


A Dream of Running Water

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Death Eaters, M/M, Post - Half-Blood Prince AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-04
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-02-24 03:56:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 35,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2567333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Driven nearly mad by his bitterness against the Dark Lord, Draco becomes a spy for the Order of the Phoenix. The device they sneak him to aid in his reports has unpredictable side-effects—like allowing Draco to dream of a landscape with a river running through it. That would be soothing, if Potter wasn’t there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Box

**Author's Note:**

> This will probably be a fairly short fic, maybe ten or twelve chapters. It will be updated every Tuesday.
> 
> Warning for minor character death, violence, gore, and angst.

Draco stared. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing. He wouldn’t let himself understand it. His mother’s hand was firm on his arm, but he barely felt it.  
  
The Dark Lord had broken the imprisoned Death Eaters out of Azkaban. He had invited them into the great ballroom of Malfoy Manor where he had commended them for their past works and loyalty.  
  
And then he had lifted his wand, and Draco’s father had dropped to the floor, screaming and convulsing.  
  
Draco had given a wordless shout and tried to run to him. That was when his mother had started holding him back, and for a second, Draco fought her single-mindedly.  
  
The Dark Lord turned his head. His red eyes managed to freeze Draco, froze his pain and his anger and the hatred that he had thought would keep him going. He cowered down, the Dark Mark on his arm burning. His mouth filled with blood as he bit at his cheeks and tongue and tried as hard as he could not to cry out.  
  
“Little Malfoy,” said the Dark Lord, his voice a rattle and click, like scales dragged across the floor. “You should not be surprised. You were the one who gave me the idea for this, after all. Had you not failed in your task and left it up to my most faithful servant to complete, then your father would not have suffered this fate.”  
  
He waved his wand again, and Lucius arched up, something exploding through his chest and back. Draco didn’t understand at first, and then he did. The Dark Lord had enchanted his father’s ribs to break and project in every direction, tearing flesh and piercing his lungs and heart. Lucius couldn’t even scream now.  
  
Draco tried to run again. His mother snatched him back, and then someone blocked his view and seized his chin. It was Snape, staring down at him with no emotion on his face at all.  
  
“Face the consequences of what you did,” he hissed. “You pitiful  _child_. You were bound by the terms of your own misunderstanding to do what you did.” He clenched Draco’s chin hard enough that blood welled out from his jaw. “Look on this!”  
  
There was a crack, and then Snape moved out of the way and Draco saw the bloody ruin of his father’s corpse, bones sticking out as though something living had tried to hatch from Lucius like an egg.  
  
That was what he saw. Then the world went grey and twisted, and he knew he would have fainted if not for Snape’s calm slap across his face.  
  
“He thought he was an adult, my Lord,” Snape’s voice said next, addressing the Dark Lord, thick with disgust. “He is nothing but a pitiful  _child_.”  
  
Draco stared at Snape, and wanted to say many things—how he would have killed Dumbledore if Snape hadn’t taken his  _chance_ away, how not even Snape had taken the Mark so young, how he was stronger and more courageous than Snape had any idea of. He opened his mouth to prove he could be faithful.  
  
Faithful to the man who had killed his father?  
  
Things had changed, and Draco wasn’t sure what he should do next. It was the same uncertainty that had haunted him since he and Snape came back to the Death Eaters, but stronger now. For the moment, he swayed back and forth, staring, and Snape sneered at him again and stepped so that he was clutching Draco’s shoulder in a grip even stronger than his mother’s grasp on his arm.  
  
“Shall I make sure that he takes a good look, my Lord?” Snape asked.  
  
Draco came back to life and tried to struggle. Snape pinched something in his arm that made it go absolutely numb, and Draco gasped and dropped his head forwards. For the moment, the impulse to fight back had gone, and his head reeled with pain and nausea as the Dark Lord laughed. His snake swayed beside him, hissing, as though she was echoing the laughter.  
  
Once, Draco had wished that he could understand the conversations between the Dark Lord and his snake, both because he wanted to be a Parselmouth himself and because it would provide him with fascinating insight into Dark Arts secrets that way. But now, he watched them, and he burned.  
  
“Yes, Severus, make sure the boy understands,” said the Dark Lord, with a languid wave of his hand, lounging on the throne made of sculpted bones that had been, at one time, an ordinary chair that Draco’s ancestors had used to keep watch on the dances in the ballroom. “I would not want to repeat the lesson.”  
  
 _He could. My mother_ —  
  
Draco didn’t even have time to finish the thought before Snape dragged him roughly away from Narcissa and forced him to his knees next to Lucius’s corpse. Draco gagged from the smell of blood and the other things that had torn forth with the ribs and pooled on the floor next to the body.  
  
This wasn’t how he wanted to remember his father. But he thought it was probably how he was going to.  
  
“Your father shit himself before he died,” said the Dark Lord, and the laughter of Draco’s aunt Bellatrix joined in, ringing high and hateful, making Draco’s hands ache with how badly he wanted to hurt the both of them.  
  
 _I am going to destroy you,_ Draco thought, and kept his head bowed so that the Dark Lord would not read the thought out of his eyes.  _Or die trying._  
  
*  
  
Draco was ready. Snape had hauled him out of the ballroom and locked him in the small suite of chambers reassigned to Draco when he was brought here from Hogwarts, but he had known Snape would visit sometime, for a gloating session if nothing else. The instant Snape stepped through the door, Draco pointed his wand straight at Snape’s chest and whispered, “ _Sectumsempra_ ,” his mind harsh and clear.  
  
There was a shield in the way before the spell even started moving, a shield that fastened itself to the end of Draco’s wand and jolted him backwards and away from Snape. Draco sobbed angrily as he crashed into the wall, and his wand rolled on the floor. In seconds, he was up and scrambling after it.  
  
Snape stepped forwards and planted his foot on the wand. Draco went still, his hands clenching. He knew that Snape could snap the wand in a moment, and that would leave him defenseless among the Death Eaters.  
  
Snape stood there, staring at him. Draco tilted his head back and met the stare. So  _what_ if he earned Snape’s disapproval for it? It was clear that Snape was just here to torment him anyway.  
  
“Listen, stupid boy,” Snape whispered. “How good is your Occlumency?”  
  
“I don’t need to hide anything from  _you_ ,” said Draco. He didn’t see why he had to respond in any other way. He knew Snape could read the thoughts out of his head. Let him. He was the one who had caused Draco’s hatred in the first place, who had caused the whole _situation_ , by bringing Draco back to the Death Eaters and taking away the task that would have protected Draco’s family.  
  
His  _father_ …  
  
Draco’s teeth clenched, and he nearly flung himself at Snape again, but Snape’s hand came out and slapped his face, still red and stinging from last time. Draco clenched his tongue furiously between his teeth and sat up, staring at Snape.   
  
“Listen to me,” said Snape. “I will only ask one more time.” He shook his head, an expression of loathing on his face that Draco was suddenly sure wasn’t directed at him. Snape seemed to hate  _himself._ Well, that was a good start, though in Draco’s opinion it would never pay for what Snape had been complicit in doing to Draco’s father. “How good is your Occlumency?”  
  
“Bellatrix trained me until I could resist her,” said Draco. Something was happening. It was important. Why, he didn’t know, but it was. He rose slowly to his feet, brushing his shoulder off and pointedly moving away from Snape.  
  
Snape, infuriatingly, didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were distant as he nodded. “I suppose that her training would teach you to resist the Legilimency of someone mad,” he murmured. “Of course, the Dark Lord is much more powerful.”  
  
Draco gaped at Snape. He was talking about  _resisting_ the Dark Lord? Why? Of course Snape was utterly faithful. The Dark Lord had called him that, and he wasn’t the sort of person you could fool.  
  
 _If he’s even a person._ Draco’s bitterness surged back, and Snape’s gaze returned to him.  
  
“Listen to me,” Snape rasped, bending towards Draco. “I will say this only once,  _do_ this only once. If you try to attack me again, then I am going to walk out of here, and you may starve to death locked in your futility for all I care.”  
  
Draco opened his mouth to ask whether the Dark Lord had ordered him not to be fed, but then closed it again. There was a kind of fearful intensity to Snape’s face he’d never seen before, not even over Potions, which he had thought was the only thing Snape grew passionate about.  
  
“Do you want to see the murderer of your father suffer?” Snape whispered.  
  
Draco paused. He couldn’t tell whether he was being offered vengeance on the Dark Lord or Snape himself. The latter made the most sense, since Snape seemed to hate himself, maybe enough to give Draco a fair shot.  
  
But whatever he meant, Draco wanted it. “Yes,” he said.  
  
Snape nodded once. “Then I will bring you something that will help,” he said, and turned to go.  
  
“Wait!” Draco snapped, and was disconcerted by the flat look that Snape tossed him over his shoulder.  
  
“No,” said Snape, and his voice was a hiss again. “That is what  _you_ will do. Impatient child who never thought about the consequences of anything…” Draco lost the rest of his words as Snape shut the door behind him and walked away.  
  
Draco lay down on the small, cramped bed that was a disgrace after the large one in his  _real_ suite of rooms, and stared bitterly at the door. He would wait, since Snape had left him no choice.  
  
But even in his waiting, he would dream of his vengeance, and his thoughts would revolve around it, and when the time came to take it, then he would be slow.  
  
*  
  
Draco woke with a start when someone opened his door. He sat up, expecting either his aunt or one of the other Death Eaters with a tray. It was a longer time than the Dark Lord usually let him go without food. He wanted to keep Draco alive as a toy that he could play with whenever he wanted.  
  
 _Maybe not for much longer…_  
  
But Draco pushed that thought away. He was going to think about revenge, and nothing else.  
  
Snape moved into the room with a quick step, turning his head from side to side as if checking for hidden intruders. He relaxed only a moment later and moved over to set the tray down on the table next to Draco’s bed. Draco winced. It held a few dry pieces of bread and the obligatory piece of cheese that his mother sometimes managed to smuggle to him.  
  
“I gained the right to come here by telling the Dark Lord that I wanted to discipline you,” said Snape, staring into his eyes. “So you are to scream when I tell you to.”  
  
Draco nodded, his throat dry. For all that he thought someone focused on revenge shouldn’t be afraid, he  _was_ when he thought about what Snape might do to make him scream if he didn’t comply.  
  
“You are to take the thing I give you,” said Snape. “You are to allow me to lock the memory away in your mind, so that it will only surface when you are alone.”  
  
Draco surged upright. “I  _told_ you that my Occlumency is good enough!”  
  
Snape’s hand shot out, slapping him again. Draco let loose a startled yelp, which was probably part of Snape’s plan, and clapped his hand to his burning cheek. He glared at Snape in resentment. Plan or not, that bloody  _hurt.  
  
_ “And I saw every thought that was passing through your head when you told me that,” Snape said, his voice a dry whip. “You are not good enough to defeat me. You will not defeat the Dark Lord. You are to agree to this, or I will walk out this door and not come back. I will take the death that the Unbreakable Vow will give me over dealing with your stupidity one second longer.”  
  
Draco paused. He knew what kind of death the Unbreakable Vow gave, and it was no joke. And he knew that Snape’s own survival was important to him. If he would walk away…  
  
Draco wanted revenge, but his curiosity was awake and flaring again, too. He wanted to know what would make Snape take this kind of  _risk_.  
  
He swallowed. “All right.”  
  
Snape studied him in burning silence for a few moments more, before abruptly nodding and pulling something out from an inner pocket. Draco stared at it. It appeared to be a small, oval-shaped ivory box. A tree was carved on the top, but no matter how long Draco looked, he couldn’t see the shape of a lid that flipped back. Maybe it wasn’t a box at all, but just a pedestal or bookend of some kind.  
  
“What is it?” Draco finally asked, meeting Snape’s eyes.  
  
“It is better if you do not know the name,” said Snape, and Draco was abruptly certain that he didn’t know the name  _himself_ and was just saying that to save face. But Snape went on, and Draco had to attend to his words. “But it will connect you, via a sort of shared dream, to—someone else who wants to fight the Dark Lord.”  
  
Draco’s breath caught. He knew who Snape must mean, although he still had no idea why Snape would have an artifact like this. “You mean Potter, don’t you?” he whispered.  
  
Snape struck hard into his mind while Draco was gaping at him with wide eyes, and Draco staggered and lifted a hand to the side of his head. He had no trouble screaming now, as Snape dug through his memories, lifting and tossing them, and then found a safe pocket in the corner of Draco’s mind. Draco felt him bury the memory of the box and the conversation there, and the box itself slipped into his robe pocket, becoming a hazy picture a second later.  
  
“You will put it beneath your pillow, and tell whoever shows up in your dreams what you have observed during the Death Eater meetings.”  
  
Draco nodded dumbly, then sat down with another scream as Snape pulled out of his mind. For a second, Snape stood there staring at him, and Draco had the distinct feeling that he was going to say something else.  
  
Then he turned and strode out of the room.  
  
Draco bent over, his hands clamped to either side of his head. His forehead burned as though Snape had stabbed him there with a hot needle. He wondered if this was what Snape did when he was pissed off, or if it was special treatment just for Draco.  
  
The thoughts rolled around in his head, random flashes of memory that collided with others, and for a second Draco thought he was running through a corridor on his way to the Astronomy Tower, where he was going to report Dumbledore for stealing a dragon. Gradually, though, things slowed down, and Draco thought he would be able to sort them out soon.  
  
He lay back on his bed. Moving mechanically, he took something he could hardly think about out of his robe pocket and put it under his pillow. He could only see it out of the corner of his eye, too, when he glanced sideways.  
  
For a moment, it occurred to him how absurd he was, trusting Snape when Snape was one of the people he wanted to take revenge on. If Snape had just  _left Draco alone_ to get on with killing Dumbledore…  
  
But Draco felt that shameful tremble in his gut again when he thought of killing Dumbledore. He honestly wasn’t sure he could have done it, and that was horrible, but it was also true.  
  
In the end, he rolled over and dropped swiftly into sleep, memories and thoughts and plans and hopes and grief and hatred tangled into something that might have made an Occlumency shield hard enough to stop the Dark Lord.


	2. A Grey River

Draco opened his eyes to mist.  
  
For a long moment, he stood still, turning his head in all directions without moving his feet. He was used to tricks and deceptions from the Dark Lord now, and he wouldn’t expose himself to unnecessary danger just because he was a little impatient with being quiet.  
  
The mist gradually cleared, and Draco realized that the ground beneath his feet was odd, too. It trembled as if he was standing in the middle of a bed, which made Draco all the more certain this was an illusion, and the Death Eaters would roar with laughter when he fell off his bed. He folded his arms and scowled at the distant horizon. There was no way that he would let someone have that kind of triumph over him.  
  
But the mist continued clearing, and if the ground wasn’t stable, neither was it threatening. This seemed an odd kind of illusion for the Death Eaters to tease him with, anyway. Draco saw the grey country stretching out in all directions, a flat, shadowless sort of land. There was only a muffled light here, twilight, and no matter how long Draco looked, he couldn’t see the sun.  
  
The sky wasn’t even cloudy, he thought when he looked up. Just grey. The trees in sight were all the same, but they were alive. Draco reached out a hand to the one he could touch without leaning, and felt a soft thrum, like running water, beneath the bark. The soft lacy leaves were alive when he touched them, and they were a color like the inside of a pearl.  
  
Maybe this was the dreamland that Snape had promised him, after all. Draco thought it was strange, but he would put up with it. If it would help him get revenge on the Dark Lord and deliver his message to someone on Potter’s side of the war, it was worth it.  
  
The noise of real running water drew his attention, and Draco moved slowly in the direction of it. The ground still trembled beneath his feet, but only momentarily; it would stabilize when he actually stepped on it.  
  
Draco came around one of the grey trees, and caught his breath.  
  
The water in front of him was the same color as everything else, but it was beautiful as nothing else in this country was. Draco stood there and admired the different shades in the water—charcoal, pearl, near-black, darkened blue—before he shook his head and walked down to it. One of the trees grew with its huge roots in the water, and Draco sat on the largest one, a hunched one that would keep him from getting his feet wet.  
  
He had lost his thought that the water might be dangerous, and he dipped his hand down. It chilled his skin, but when he sipped from it, he sighed. It was deep and pure and clean, and so different from the deliberately dirty water that the Death Eaters sent him.  
  
Draco tucked up his feet beneath him, and sat there with his gaze fixed on the distance. The sound of the stream almost lulled him into sleeping, and only the thought that someone might show up kept him awake.  
  
“Malfoy?”  
  
Draco’s shoulders tensed, all his peace fleeing in an instant. Suddenly he could remember his father being slaughtered, and it seemed obscene to him that he should have ever forgotten that. He twisted his head around and reached for his wand.  
  
It wasn’t there.  
  
Draco clenched his hand into a fist instead, hoped that Potter wouldn’t notice he was defenseless, and snapped, “What are you doing here?”  
  
“I came here to get a message from—someone who could help me.” Potter was standing on the bank behind Draco, looking belligerent and out of place. Draco almost winced back from the colors of his clothing and eyes. “What are  _you_ doing here?”  
  
“I have the message.” The words tasted like ashes in Draco’s mouth, but not as much as words of surrender to the Dark Lord would have.  
  
Potter tilted his head back and sighed to an invisible heaven. Then he faced Draco and nodded with such an air of resignation that Draco bristled. “Fine. Let’s have it, then.”  
  
“You could be nicer,” said Draco. “I’m taking a big risk, you know. If the Dark Lord comes up and finds me with this—thing under my pillow…” It would have sounded like a more dramatic declaration if he knew the object’s name, obviously, but he thought it was plenty dramatic as it was.  
  
Potter laughed, a cracked, exhausted sound that made Draco wince for different reasons. “Yeah? Try being on the run while you try to find the secret to killing  _him_ off once and for all.” Draco was grateful that Potter hadn’t used the Dark Lord’s name, but the next second, Potter’s laughter was gone, and his eyes were narrowed. “What you’re going through is nothing next to what I’m going through, Malfoy. You were the one who  _chose_ to get that pretty little snake on your arm, and you were the one who almost killed my best friend, and—”  
  
“He killed my fucking father!” Draco yelled.  
  
He hadn’t planned to say it—he didn’t really want Potter to know anything about his personal life—but he thought later that was probably what made it effective when it came to opposing Potter. Potter’s mouth hung open a little, and he peered at Draco hard enough that Draco felt insulted. Then he slowly nodded.  
  
“That would do it,” he whispered. “I wondered why you were here instead of—the other person I was waiting for, but now I know.”  
  
“I know the other person is Snape,” said Draco tiredly. Now all the emotion was gone from him, as though the full force had been packed into his yell. “Don’t worry. He buried the memory really deep in my head so I can’t talk about it.”  
  
Potter eyed him for long enough that Draco wondered if he was going to say  _anything_ at all, and then he gave an abrupt nod that made Draco like him better and sat down on the bank a little way away from Draco. “What do you have to report?”  
  
 _He’s not my superior. He’s not my father. He’s not the Dark Lord_ —  
  
No, Potter wasn’t, and the remembrance of why he was here made the spite drain out of Draco. He gave Potter a tired sigh and muttered, “There’s been several Death Eaters freed from Azkaban. My father—is dead.” Only the thought of how Lucius would frown if he started sobbing in front of Potter let Draco stumble through those words. “I think the others that you have to worry about the most are Julian Elwood and Walden Macnair. Macnair swore some kind of oath of vengeance against you and that bumbling oaf Hagrid.”  
  
Potter ignored this as though Macnair was nothing to worry about. Maybe he wasn’t, when compared to the Dark Lord. “I haven’t heard of Elwood.”  
  
“He was imprisoned when—I think when we were ten,” said Draco. It was strange to think of himself sharing an age in common with Potter, but then again, they had a lot more than that in common now. “He’d slipped past the Ministry in the first war. They didn’t know he was a Death Eater. Then he sort of went mental waiting for the Dark Lord to get back, and he threw the Unforgivables enough to force them to imprison him.”  
  
“Should I be worried about him just because he’s crazy?”  
  
Draco rubbed the back of his neck. He thought it was the most civil conversation he’d ever had with Potter, though, yes, probably also the strangest. “That’s not the only reason. He’s a little more sane than Bellatrix, but he’ll do anything the Dark Lord tells him to do. And he’s developing some sort of spell that focuses on your name.” It was hard to remember back to the last Death Eater meeting, because he’d been thinking too hard during the meeting about his father coming home instead of paying attention to the words around him.  
  
“My  _name_ ,” said Potter, and frowned at the river.  
  
“That’s just what I heard,” Draco snapped. “I was a little distracted.” He would let Potter assume that he had been distracted by his father’s death if he  _wanted_ to, he told the part of him that was unhappy with the way the conversation was going.  
  
Potter clenched a hand on the ground beside him as if he was going to tear up the grey grass, then shook his head and turned back to Draco. “Is it like a Taboo?”  
  
“Maybe.” That made the most sense, now that Draco thought about it. He was annoyed that he hadn’t come up with the theory himself, and that made him snappish. “I’m just the messenger, Potter. I didn’t know that I was coming to you, you know. I have other things to do.”  
  
Potter gave him a distant look and stood up. “Thanks, Malfoy. Listen.” Draco bristled again. He had the feeling that Potter was mentally reclassifying Draco as a soldier in the Army of Harry Potter, and Draco could do without that sensation. “Do you think that you can keep an ear out for any mention of valuable objects the Dark Lord has?”  
  
Draco stared. Potter wanted to collect the Dark Lord’s treasure now? “I have no idea what you mean.”  
  
Potter fidgeted from foot to foot a moment. “I mean, I just thought that—you know how sometimes someone has a weakness because they get obsessed with something?”  
  
Draco gave Potter a pointed look.  
  
Potter flushed, a color Draco could see even in that dim country, and his voice rose. “I didn’t ask you to make a comment on—”  
  
“I know what you mean, Potter,” Draco cut him off. “And you already know about his obsession with you, so I suppose you mean obsessions with other things?”  
  
“Yes, exactly.” Potter seemed just as relieved as Draco was to slip past the awkwardness that made the air around them even dimmer. “Any—treasures that he mentions. Objects. Things that he wants to find or take over.”  
  
Draco closed his eyes and tried again to recall the last Death Eater meeting. The Dark Lord had talked about something he was in quest of, but Draco didn’t think he’d ever mentioned the item’s name. And he had fed someone to his snake, some captured Muggle. Draco had taken care not to watch that part.  
  
“I think,” he said slowly, concentrating as hard as he could, “that he’s probably the most obsessed with his snake.”  
  
There was a noise like someone gulping, and he opened his eyes to see that Potter’s face had gone pale this time. He was nodding. “Yeah, that would do it,” he muttered to himself.  
  
“Potter?” Draco refused to be left out of the loop if he was taking this many risks for Potter, and especially because Professor Snape seemed to have successfully protected Draco’s mind thus far. “Why do you want to know this?”  
  
Potter snapped his eyes opened and shook his head. “There are secrets that I can’t tell anyone, Malfoy,” he said. “At least, not anyone who doesn’t already know them and is committed to helping me.” He sighed when Draco stared at him. “Maybe someday, after the war, then I can tell them to you.”  
  
“I want to know what I’m risking my life to help,” Draco said, settling himself more firmly on the bank of the river. “And who says that I’ll be alive after the war for you to tell your precious secrets to? My father wasn’t.”  
  
“Trust me when I say—”  
  
“You sound like bloody Dumbledore,” Draco put in. He didn’t approve of Potter going all brooding and mysterious like this. “You’re not about to tell me that there’s some great secret and then refuse to tell me what it  _is_?”  
  
“I should never have implied that the secret existed in the first place,” Potter muttered, and gave Draco a look that Draco didn’t know how to define. “Thanks for what you told me, Malfoy. It could be useful.”  
  
And then he vanished utterly from the dream landscape, leaving Draco sitting by the river in unhappy silence until the dream passed into true darkness, and images that he didn’t want but which would never leave him.  
  
*  
  
“ _Up,_ little baby!”  
  
Draco scrambled out of bed, clawing for his wand, his heart hammering so hard that he was afraid for a second he’d screamed out the news of his meeting with Potter and all the rest of it. But he hadn’t, and the memories were already dimming and fading in his mind, tucking themselves up and stealing off. Draco thought he had dreamed of grey cloth, and green eyes, and running water, but he couldn’t remember why.  
  
And then he didn’t have time to think of why, as Bellatrix shot one of the curses at him that she was fond of using to teach him to be “more alert.”  
  
Draco rolled under the first one, and watched it hit the wall and crack the stone. Then he found his wand, and he cursed Bellatrix from under the bed, tangling her feet and making her fall to the floor and lie knotted in her own hair. Bellatrix uttered what could have been a laughing snarl or a snarling laugh.  
  
“Little baby boy is growing up!” she crooned, and used a spell Draco had never seen before, one that hit the floor in front of Draco and grew.  
  
It was a black spider by the time it was done growing, one with intense red eyes that reminded Draco of the Dark Lord’s and a white hourglass on its back that promised nothing good. It ran at Draco, and skittered around to keep up with him when Draco skipped to the side. Draco was gasping, his throat raw with panic, aware that Bellatrix was already preparing another spell and he had no idea what it was and no idea how to avoid this particular one or avoid dying a death like his father had died.  
  
One spell his father had shown him once came back as though Draco was standing in the study with him and discussing it for the first time. Lucius had warned him never to use the spell in an enclosed space, but it wasn’t as though Draco had much bloody  _choice_ right now.  
  
He conjured the fireball on the tip of his wand and swept around in a circle, surrounding himself with a ring of fire. He heard the sharp sizzle as the fire consumed the spider, and then it spread up and around the curtains, over his head, and onto the walls and his bed. It wasn’t Fiendfyre, but it was something very nearly as hard to control.  
  
Bellatrix screamed. Draco whipped back to face the door and saw that she had the fire on her robes and was trying to stamp it out.  
  
She didn’t know the countercurse. Draco raised his wand with the incantation already on his tongue.  
  
And then he paused.  
  
He thought of the way she had crouched and laughed at the Dark Lord’s side while he tortured Draco or his mother. He thought of the way she had never spoken up when the Dark Lord ranted about the weakness of the Malfoys, and how she had begged for the Cruciatus to be cast on her and the pleasure of casting it on someone else.  
  
He thought of the steel claws that had dug into his mind when he was learning Occlumency, and how she had laughed and told him it was  _supposed_ to be like rape.  
  
Draco didn’t call the fire back.  
  
Bellatrix was slapping and wailing at her own clothes a minute later when the fire climbed high enough that it wreathed her hair and her face in shimmering white, and she  _had_ to stop screaming. Draco dimmed the fire then. Maybe this would be enough, if she was voiceless and couldn’t beg or curse or scream at him anymore.  
  
It had gone further than that.  
  
He was still staring at the blackened corpse on the floor when Snape arrived.


	3. An Experienced Actor

“Do exactly as I bid you, and  _don’t say anything_.”  
  
That had been Snape’s sole instruction after he stepped into Draco’s room and found the blackened body of his aunt on the floor. He had cast a few spells that did nothing as far as Draco could see, except clean up some of the ash. Snape’s mouth was taut, and once his hand shook on the wand.  
  
He had laid it down then and spent a moment contemplating or meditating or something, his head in his hands. Draco, staring at him in silent dread that he would have broken except for Snape’s instructions not to talk, felt his heart tremble. If Snape didn’t know how to save him, there was no way that  _Draco_ could learn.  
  
But then Snape opened his eyes, and they were as fathomless as ever. He gave a single nod at Draco and turned away, then whirled back and seized Draco’s shoulder. Draco slumped to the ground, crying out. Snape was holding him in a way that hurt more than Draco had ever experienced in a single part of his body.  
  
He thought of the Dark Lord, though, and managed to keep to the order not to talk.  
  
“You  _stupid_ little boy,” Snape snarled, his face down at Draco’s level. “You let your anger get the better of you, didn’t you?” He shook Draco when Draco just sat there, dazed, and turned away with an expression of disgust that Draco couldn’t have bettered. “You shall have to hope the Dark Lord will be more merciful.”  
  
And then he hauled Draco to his feet and out of his room, in the direction of the dining room where the Dark Lord usually held court.  
  
Draco opened his mouth. He had thought Snape was going to save him,  _help_ him, maybe hide the body, not take him to his doom!  
  
Snape turned on one heel and shook him hard enough that Draco’s head snapped back and forth and he whimpered. “You are an  _idiot_ ,” Snape said, and his voice was so fierce that Draco cowered again. “I wash my hands of you. May the Dark Lord find some use for you!”  
  
The only thing that kept Draco from utterly panicking and trying to run was that moment of Snape touching his face. He had  _planned_ what to do. This wasn’t random. It wasn’t an outburst of frustration.  
  
It was meant to  _look_ like an outburst of frustration, Draco realized abruptly. He knew Professor Snape had good Occlumency shields. He had tried to breach them once, and felt as if he were skidding on solid ice before Snape had thrown him contemptuously back into his own mind.  
  
If the Dark Lord tried to breach Snape’s mind…  
  
Draco trembled, and no longer slouched as he walked beside Snape. He couldn’t say that he was eager to meet his fate, but he would rather not exasperate the one person here with a plan that might be able to save him.  
  
*  
  
“He has killed Bellatrix, my Lord.”  
  
Snape snapped the words in a voice that trembled on the edge of patience, and thrust Draco into the middle of the dining room. Draco tripped. He hadn’t known Snape would do that, and he barely caught himself on his hands and knees before he slammed his nose into the table.  
  
Snape had interrupted a meeting. Draco glanced around from beneath lowered eyelids, and saw most of the Inner Circle at the table. Snape was the only prominent one who was missing. Well, and his father, of course.  
  
Then Draco’s memory froze again, and he bowed his head and let his eyes fix on the floor as though nothing was more interesting.  
  
“One of the traitors has killed one of my most faithful?” The Dark Lord’s voice was high and emotionless, something that made Draco tremble harder than he’d ever done. Draco heard the swish of robes and the slow footsteps coming towards him. He made himself stay still.  
  
“Yes.” Snape’s voice was a hiss. “I was there to witness it. It was the Constant Conflagration Spell, and he burned her up although he could have saved her. Where was his heart for killing when it came to Albus Dumbledore?”  
  
 _I hope you know what the fuck you’re doing,_ Draco thought, now on the edge of hysteria instead of panic. All of this was designed to stir up not just the Dark Lord’s ire against him, but the memory of what he had done before this to make the Dark Lord despise him. What  _did_ Snape think was going to happen?  
  
The slowly pacing feet reached him, and the Dark Lord’s hand rested beneath his chin. Draco had known this would happen, and he looked up and resigned himself to painful Legilimency.  
  
The memory of what he had done to Bellatrix was ripped from his mind. Draco screamed again, and saw Fenrir Greyback lean eagerly forwards, his nails scratching light grooves in the top of the table.  
  
“He screams like prey,” Fenrir murmured, and his nostrils twitched as he took a deep, appreciative sniff of air that was probably scented with Draco’s fear.  
  
“It is as Severus says,” said the Dark Lord, and his mind leaped out of Draco’s and towards Professor Snape. Draco became aware Snape was kneeling beside him, face uplifted and earnest, utterly defenseless.  
  
 _That’s the way it looks, anyway,_ Draco thought, and he was intensely glad that the Dark Lord was no longer looking at him. On the other hand, the Dark Lord was so powerful a Legilimens that he might be able to learn what they were planning from skimming it off Draco’s surface thoughts. Draco looked at the ground again, and clenched his hands next to him.  
  
“The boy was provoked?” Whatever the Dark Lord had seen in Snape’s thoughts apparently amused him. “Does he lose his temper so easily, then?”  
  
“He seems to, my Lord.” Snape drew his robes around him and sniffed in Draco’s direction. “Uncontrolled, impulsive,  _childish._ He has no use to you, my Lord, and will only stand in your way. Will you permit me to kill him as I have removed other…impediments for you?”  
  
Draco crouched there because he was too scared to do anything else. But his mind was turning in so many different directions that it was physically painful.  _This_ was Snape’s idea of “saving” him?  
  
“Perhaps he has a use,” the Dark Lord whispered, “if he has a taste for pain and a ready temper.”  
  
Snape shifted. “My Lord?” But he went still at another glance from the Dark Lord. Draco wondered what he would have done if that hadn’t happened. Dared to protest? Done something else to send the Dark Lord’s mind in a different direction?  
  
The Dark Lord turned back to Draco. “Child,” he said, and the hatred Draco felt for Potter or even Bellatrix was nothing compared to the hatred he felt for that voice and that word, “you may know that I recently freed a Death Eater named Julian Elwood.”  
  
Elwood was sitting at the table behind him. Draco nodded mutely, held that way partially by fear and partially by Snape’s instructions.  
  
“You will assist him in his magical research,” said the Dark Lord. “You are to do whatever he tells you, without hesitation. If you hesitate, then I will use the same spell on you that you did on Bellatrix, with an incantation to make it last three times as long. Do you understand me?”  
  
Draco shuddered, and went on shuddering. It felt as though his spine and arms and shoulders had escaped his control, and so had his head. He went on nodding until the Dark Lord turned abruptly away from him, looking bored.  
  
“Take him away and put him to his new duties, Julian,” the Dark Lord murmured, with a wave of his hand. “He will be lucky if he comes out of it with his mind intact, but he has cost me a Death Eater. One mad one may replace another.”  
  
Elwood stalked towards him, a bulk of a man with brown hair that fell around his broken nose. He looked down at Draco for a moment, and then drew back his boot.  
  
Draco knew Elwood would kick him in the side and break ribs and think nothing of it. And then it would be even harder to do the work the Dark Lord had commanded him to do, and survive.  
  
He thought he was the only one looking at Snape as he stood, since the Dark Lord had already turned back to his confederates, and Snape was kneeling on the floor in a submissive posture. Snape’s eyes shone.  
  
There was a mean satisfaction about the way they did, as though this had been what he intended all along.  
  
 _Was it?_  
  
There was no way that Draco could know. The only things he knew for certain were that Snape had gone to a great deal of trouble to set up the memory of him getting angry at Draco over Bellatrix’s death and dragging Draco out of his room, in case the Dark Lord peered into his mind—  
  
And that he had better do what the Dark Lord told him and not mess up again, or he would die.  
  
 _At least that part hasn’t changed,_ Draco thought gloomily, and followed Elwood into what had once been the Manor’s primary Potions lab.  
  
*  
  
Draco’s mind whirled as he sank into bed. He could see why the Dark Lord had thought he would be good at Elwood’s work. It was a complex, challenging, delicate task, but along the way, it involved a lot of destruction, and the torture of—  
  
Draco hardened his heart and mind. He hadn’t wanted to kill Dumbledore, but he had known that the poison or the necklace could do it, if they got there. They had almost killed other people. It was silly pretending that part of him wasn’t willing to do anything it could to stay alive.  
  
Well, for family. And revenge. But Draco had to stay alive to protect his mother or get any sort of revenge.  
  
Elwood was building what he had said, when Draco asked the one question he was permitted each hour, was a “pain machine.” Draco could see why it had that name. It was a great, delicate golden cage of braided wires, and the dangling wires wove around slabs of stone and turning gears of silver and vials of crystal. Draco had actually thought the whole thing was meant to deliver potions to unwilling victims, at first.  
  
And there were unwilling victims. Oh, they were there.  
  
Draco clamped his hands over his eyes and rolled onto his side. He wondered if Snape knew about this, knew exactly what he had delivered Draco into. Or maybe he didn’t care, as long as Draco was protected and his vow was fulfilled. Or maybe he would have taken anything, because he was less in control of the situation than Draco thought and had to accept what the Dark Lord demanded.  
  
There were Muggleborns there, and traitors to the Dark Lord’s cause, and a few Muggles. Elwood had explained that Muggles didn’t have the magical core necessary to power the machine, and they were kept only as “controls.” Whatever that meant. Draco hadn’t learned all he had to know yet.  
  
What he did know was that the victims were bound to the machine, wires coiling around them, and Elwood would cast spells, mostly the Imperius Curse, that forced them to say their full names in precise, clear voices. Then each of them would pronounce Harry Potter’s full name in the same way.  
  
And when the second name was said, the machine trembled into life, and the victims screamed and screamed, and golden, shining strands of magic spread out of their bodies. The magic solidified into wires that sprouted more crystal vials, which filled with a shimmering clear mist. And then Elwood would end the spell and move forwards to attach the gears and stones, which seemed to be the only part of the machine not grown out of their bodies.  
  
Draco had no idea what this was. He only knew it was more complicated than putting a Taboo on a name, which the Dark Lord had done himself, to his own name. More complicated  _by far._  
  
He shuddered again—at least it had stopped being the uncontrollable shuddering that the Dark Lord’s touch had inflicted on him—and slipped into sleep.  
  
*  
  
The moment he opened his eyes in the grey twilight, Draco remembered Potter, and the box Snape had given him, and the dream caged away from his consciousness all day.  
  
 _Snape is a master at Legilimency,_ Draco thought. The Dark Lord had picked up on no hint of Draco’s treachery because Snape had buried the memories and thoughts in thoroughly in Draco’s mind. What Draco didn’t think about, he couldn’t betray to the Dark Lord.  
  
Draco wandered towards the river again, though this time he did detour to see whether there was anything else to this country except trees and grass and the river. There didn’t seem to be. Everything was the same color, too.  
  
Not that Draco cared when he dipped a hand into the water and scooped up the cleanliness to his mouth for a taste. It seemed as though his body had been longing for that all day. Maybe part of him remembered his last taste. Draco relaxed as though someone had slipped a Calming Draught into his food, and then sat down and let his feet dangle in the water. If it didn’t hurt him to drink, he didn’t think that it would hurt him to touch it with bare skin.  
  
“Malfoy.”  
  
This time, Draco didn’t jump. He just turned around and nodded to Potter from his place on the bank, and then watched as Potter jogged towards him and halted uncertainly a foot away.  
  
“You look different,” Potter said. “As though someone’s been torturing you.”  
  
Draco shrugged. Here, it was easier to forget about the problems that seemed so pressing when he was awake. “Not physically. The Dark Lord and Snape have both been through my mind, and I’ve had to watch people being tortured. Oh,” he added, remembering that morning. Even  _that_ seemed to have faded from his mind, incredible as it was. “And I killed Bellatrix today. That probably has something to do with it.”  
  
Potter, who’d been about to take his seat on a stone that projected into the current, fell into the stream at that. Draco snickered, and didn’t help him out. It did his heart good to see Potter paddling to shore and coming out of it with his hair slicked back with water, his eyes fastened on Draco as though nothing else was important.  
  
 _It does me good in lots of ways,_ Draco vaguely acknowledged.  
  
“I wanted to kill her,” Potter whispered. “She killed Sirius.”  
  
 _That,_ Draco hadn’t expected. At least he was seated on the flat bank itself, not on something pointed he could fall off, or he might have imitated Potter. “What?” he asked.  
  
“My godfather,” said Potter. “She knocked him through a magical artifact at the Department of Mysteries. I thought at first he might have survived, or she could have cursed him with a curse that he could live through, but—no, he’s dead.” He stared off into the distance. “And now you tell me that she’s dead?” He looked back at Draco.  
  
“Sorry,” Draco said without sincerity, shrugging. “I would have saved her for you if I knew.” He wrapped his arms around his knees, his shock already fading. Who could say that everyone didn’t have unexpected dark things inside them? Not Draco. “By the way, I think you ought to know that the Dark Lord, as a kind of punishment and a kind of way of making use of me, put me to working with Julian Elwood.”  
  
“The one who’s putting the Taboo on my name.” With effort, Potter seemed to forget about his desire to kill someone Draco had already killed, and fixed his gaze on him, blinking. “What about him? What’s he doing?”  
  
“It’s not the Taboo,” said Draco. “Not just that. I don’t know what it is, exactly.”   
  
He told Potter all he could remember, and Potter’s face was grim when he was done. He shook his head when Draco stared at him, and murmured, “I’ve never heard of anything like that, either. I’ll have to ask Hermione.”  
  
“Do you ask her for everything?” Draco demanded. Some of his peacefulness had leaked away as he recounted the horrors that he’d lived through that afternoon. “Can’t you do any research on your own?”  
  
“It’s stupid to do things that someone else can do better,” said Potter, and stood up with an angry glance at him. “Besides, you’d better be grateful that I’m the only one who can come to you like this, because I was the one that Moody gave the bloody box to. Or Ron would be meeting you here instead.” He jerked his head down. “Until next time, Malfoy.”  
  
He was walking away when Draco called out to him, “What, no thanks? Not even a ‘Thank you for risking your life to come here, Malfoy’?”  
  
Potter paused in mid-step and looked back at him. “Thank you for coming, Draco,” he said softly.  
  
He vanished. Draco sat there, feeling unfairly breathless, until the greyness palled around him into the black depths of true sleep.


	4. A Dark Purpose

“I want you to try the spell that will bind them to the machine yourself, now that we’re past the first stage,” said Elwood, and pushed Draco forwards, into the path of the next staggering captive, with his wand in the middle of Draco’s back. “These are going to be used just to power the machine, not to mark Potter’s name.”  
  
Draco choked on saliva. But he knew he couldn’t stand there and do nothing. Snape had risked his life and done what he could to save Draco. Draco couldn’t give up on his sacrifice and dishonor it like that.  
  
And, of course, he would also like to survive himself, and maybe stand a chance to rescue his mother from here at some point.  
  
He had to put aside thoughts of how he didn’t want to torture anyone, he didn’t want to kill anyone. He had thought that about Dumbledore, but he had managed it just fine with Bellatrix. His own aunt. Someone who could do that should have no trouble torturing someone who wasn’t even related to him by blood.  
  
His wand rose, and it seemed to Draco that he sat like a puppet in the back of his own head, as though affected by the Imperius Curse. He didn’t know what spell he had chosen until he felt his arm twitching through the wand movements, and his own voice blazed into the spell without any forethought. “ _Distraho_.”  
  
The spell was right there, it was speeding away from his wand, and it was striking the wizard. He fell on the floor and began screaming. Draco watched as the magic grew out of him and connected him to the machine, which pulsed and throbbed and grew. Elwood laughed behind him, a soft sound that scared Draco more than Bellatrix’s wild cackle would have, and he patted Draco on the shoulder.  
  
“I knew you had the heart for this work,” he said. “It isn’t burning people, but it’s making something worthy out of their magic and pain.” He turned Draco around and bent down to look into his eyes. “And you will report to the Dark Lord that I am doing well?”  
  
Draco opened his mouth to ask how he could do that, why he would be  _chosen_ to do that, when Elwood was an older Death Eater in better standing than he was.  
  
And then he shut his mouth. Of course. He understood. This was the sort of politics that his father had taught him even before the Dark Lord returned. Set your underlings to spy on each other, and the underlings would be too busy trying to control each other and manipulate others’ perceptions to turn on  _you_.  
  
“I will report to him that you are doing well,” Draco said, feeling the safest words to be the exact ones Elwood had uttered, and he bowed.  
  
For an instant, Elwood stood motionless, as though he was going to insist on a stronger pledge, and then he gave Draco a faint smile.   
  
“Good. And I will report the same of you.” He turned to reach out to one of the Muggles. “Let me show you what happens when you use the magic on one of  _these_.”  
  
Draco felt himself retreat to the back of his mind again. It was almost like the effect when Snape reached into his mind and used Legilimency to make it hard to concentrate on…things. He could do this if he didn’t think about it.  
  
“ _Distraho_ ,” he said, and Elwood nodded and walked around to the side to watch as the spell made crawling dark tendrils reach out of the Muggle, then jerk and pull. The Muggle screamed. Draco looked away from brown eyes and blue-streaked hair and other things that would have made the Muggle into a distinct teenage boy, and at Elwood.  
  
“There’s no magic in their core to power the machine or the spell,” Elwood explained. “So they simply suffer from the pain without being able to feel an end to it.” He smiled as the Muggle began to grasp and scratch at the floor with his hands, and then turned and studied Draco. “I need you to demonstrate something else for me.”  
  
“What?” Draco asked through numb lips. He could feel bits of his mind rumbling, some of the walls he had raised breaking. He didn’t want to feel that. He pushed back against the walls, and they wobbled but then shored up again.   
  
He was not going to die here. His mother was not going to die in the Manor. That would be much too big a disgrace for the role that Draco was trying to play here, a role that he had to keep going no matter how much he hated it.  
  
And it would be much too big a disgrace for the other role he was trying to play and keep going, the role he mustn’t think about.  
  
“I need you to show me that you know how to use the Killing Curse,” Elwood said, and fastened his hand on Draco’s shoulder and turned him towards the jerking Muggle. “In the end, all the glory of building this machine is to reach a  _quick_ point. This is how we’re going to destroy Harry Potter, and he’s pretty bloody quick. So you’ll cast the Killing Curse to power the machine.”  
  
Draco knew there were things in there he wasn’t hearing, things that didn’t make sense, but he had already descended into a swarm of strength. He looked at the Muggle, and he remembered what Elwood had said, that he would die over a long period of time from Draco’s curse.  
  
This was mercy, in a way. It was mercy.  
  
Draco raised his wand. For a moment, the air around him seemed to be heavy, as though he was bracing his back against a boulder. And Draco reached into himself, and stopped seeing the Muggle, and instead saw his mother, her eyes glazed and her body still. That was what she would look like if the Dark Lord used the Killing Curse on  _her_.  
  
Her face became Bellatrix’s in Draco’s head.  
  
“ _Avada Kedavra_.”  
  
The Killing Curse left his wand and struck the teenage Muggle. The black tendrils that had flared out from the Muggle’s body crumpled to the floor at once, and Draco lowered his wand and looked at the body in casual interest. He wondered whether this would really be practice for cursing Harry Potter.  
  
He wondered when he had become the one who apparently had to kill Harry Potter, instead of a weakling the Dark Lord was using for a basic purpose.  
  
“Good,” said Elwood, and he chuckled, a sound like the rustling of scales, behind Draco. “You’ll have to practice some more before you would be ready to take the field against a determined opponent, but like all things, that comes in time.” He had an odd, mentor-like tone to his voice. He touched Draco’s shoulder again. “Step back and let me bring another one forth. I need to practice my spells as well.”  
  
*  
  
“Draco.”  
  
He turned around. He knew he needed to go to bed and go to sleep as soon as possible. He didn’t know how he knew that, or  _why_ he knew that. He felt fatigue dragging at his muscles, but it was the kind he had felt ever since he had seen his father die. Why was this different?  
  
But he couldn’t ignore his mother’s voice, and after a quick glance up and down the corridor to make sure no one was observing them, Draco crossed to the door of the storage room she was peering out of. The room remained disused, now that the Dark Lord had pulled out all the Malfoy artifacts and was either using them or had played with them until he grew bored. The only notable thing about the storage room was the way that it connected to a few other rooms by means of a secret panel.  
  
“You cannot keep doing this,” his mother blurted, and seized his arm. Draco stared down at her hand, the small white circles that her nails were drilling into his flesh, and wondered why it felt as if she was gripping a piece of glass instead of his arm. “You have to stop.”  
  
Draco shook his head and looked up at her. His regal mother had her hair disordered around her face, and she might not have slept since Lucius’s death. Draco reached up and touched her chin. At least  _that_ felt normal. “I have to go,” he whispered. “You know the Dark Lord is going to kill me otherwise.”  
  
Narcissa closed her eyes tightly and swallowed. “There has to be some other means of saving your soul,” she said. “And your life at the same time.”  
  
Draco said nothing. He didn’t know what she was talking about, and unlike the mysterious things that Snape said, Draco didn’t think she was talking about something that could save his life.  
  
“I must find the way,” Narcissa said, and released his arm. “Tell Severus to watch out for a message from me.”  
  
She turned and swished back into the room before Draco could answer, and then Draco heard the grinding sound of the sliding panel. He wondered how he could tell her that “Severus” probably didn’t want to hear that from him, and how he was to find the man without permission from the Dark Lord to do so anyway.  
  
Exhausted, he went back to his room and rested his head on the pillow, and shut his eyes. It seemed to him that everyone wanted him to do something different, and then wouldn’t accept it when Draco tried to tell them that he simply couldn’t do what they wanted. Once again, it was a relief to drift, not even thinking about pain or torture or the food he would receive later, and fade into darkness.  
  
*  
  
It was never not going to be disconcerting, either the way that he faded into the darkness, or the sharp taste of the water in his mouth, or the surge of relief when he looked up and saw Potter coming towards him.  
  
“I spent the day torturing people,” Draco said harshly. “I killed one. What about you?”  
  
Potter paused and looked at him. His eyes were dark, and Draco wondered for a second if he looked the same way. There was something about Potter that suggested, yes, he knew what Draco was talking about.  
  
But then Potter took a seat on the bank and shook his head. “Moody is dead,” he announced abruptly.  
  
Draco opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn’t know what to say. He knew the “Moody” who had tortured him during their fourth year had really been a Death Eater, but that gave him no more fondness for the real one.  
  
“It should have been simple,” Potter whispered, and slumped forwards, resting his head on his knees. Draco watched him and wondered whether he should mention that Potter would feel better for a taste of the water. He might as well not have been there, though. Potter hadn’t even asked him for information. “We worked out where it was hidden, finally, and we still have friends within the school. Everything would have gone easier in the first place if I knew about Ravenclaw legends, but…never mind. We found it. That should have been  _it._  Who knew the destruction would be the hardest part?” Potter abruptly picked up a closed fist and hammered it into the grass beside him. Draco started despite the calm that the twilight realm usually inspired in him. “Who knew that the  _bastard_ Voldemort would have spells like that guarding it?”  
  
He whipped around and glared at Draco. “And don’t you  _dare_ run around flinching at the name! You have no idea how hard it was, to watch Moody just—just age and crumble into dust like that. All from grabbing hold of a stupid diadem without proper protection!”  
  
Draco had no idea what to say for a second, until the anger in Potter’s eyes struck him and called up answering anger of his own.   
  
“Yes, I have no idea how hard it is,” he said, and made his voice cutting. “I spent my day torturing and killing, but that was  _easy_. You probably think it’s easy for a Death Eater like me, anyway,” he added, and decided to go for the low blow. “The way it was easy for you to cut my chest open and almost kill me, right?”  
  
“Shut up!” Potter’s face was crimson. “I had no idea what that spell would do!”  
  
“I have no idea what these spells are doing, either!” Draco screamed back. “It has something to do with your name and killing and torture, but I have to kill and torture without even thinking about it, because I’ll go  _mad_ if I do! And then someday I’ll have to think about it, and then I either will really go mad or I’ll break down or something, and that’s if I  _survive!_  You have no idea what it’s like!”  
  
Potter paused and looked at him in silence for a long moment.  _Looked,_ Draco thought, not just stormed and waved his hands around. And then he sat back down on the bank of the stream and stared out over the running water.  
  
Draco did, too. It wasn’t as though he had anything better to do when he was here. Maybe the running water could soothe him. Maybe this would be the escape he needed to keep himself sane through the breaking process.  
  
“I’m looking for these things that are very powerful and very important to defeat Voldemort,” Potter whispered abruptly, and said nothing about Draco’s flinch this time. “I don’t know what all of them are. A few. I don’t know where all of them are. One. If I can destroy them, then I can destroy  _him_. But it’s such a desperate chance, and I thought—I thought I would make it better by letting more people help me, and—it cost Moody his life.”  
  
Draco looked away from Potter. He was bearing his own burdens, he thought. He couldn’t bear Potter’s as well.  
  
But Potter said nothing about asking Draco to bear his. He just went on looking out over the water, and something in his posture of hunched misery jerked Draco’s words out of him.  
  
“I was trying not to think about it,” Draco whispered. “I was trying to think about my mother’s life, and how I would spare her. But even that wasn’t enough. I don’t know. I have the hatred in my soul, because I burned my aunt to death. But I’m still flickering in and out, and I can do it, but only if I don’t think about it. How long is that going to  _work_?”  
  
Potter reached out, blindly groping. For one moment, Draco thought he was going to touch the root of the tree next to him, and wondered why. Potter was sitting on the bank itself; he had a firm grip.  
  
But instead, Potter’s hand found his, and Draco gasped. The twilight realm wasn’t very cold, but it was cool, and he didn’t know it until he felt the feverish heat of Potter’s skin. He blinked and stared down at their clasped hands.  
  
Once, he would have given anything for that sight. Now, he had no idea what to say.  
  
Potter had the words for him.  
  
“What are we doing?” he whispered. “How can we defeat him? A couple of kids? Even four kids?” Draco knew he was including Weasley and Granger in that total, and it was the only time, ever, he wouldn’t object at finding himself in that company. “I don’t know how Dumbledore could have expected this of us.” He turned his head and stared at Draco in misery. “Why did he tell me about this quest when he knew how hard it was going to be? Why did he try so hard to save you if it was just going to end up with you having to kill people anyway?”  
  
Draco shook his head. His skin and his voice and his mouth all felt as dry as paper. “It’s not like Dumbledore could have predicted all this, Potter. He didn’t even predict that Professor Snape would turn on him.”  
  
Potter closed his eyes. “I think he planned a lot more of it than I knew at the time. He was teaching me—he was showing me—things that he wouldn’t have showed me if he thought that he was going to survive and be with me.”  
  
He opened his eyes again, and they were bitter and blazing. “But he should have tried  _harder_!” he shouted across the stream. “He should have thought that I would find it hard! He should have tried harder!”  
  
He turned and stared at Draco. “For all of us,” he whispered.  
  
Draco said nothing, but maintained the hold on Potter’s hand. It was painful, in some ways, sitting that close to someone he’d hated, or thought he hated, and he wasn’t going to get any nearer.  
  
But they were huddled against the desperation of their circumstances, and one person to be closer to was better than no one.   
  
And other than Draco whispering once, “Potter, the incantation that Elwood is using is  _Distraho_ ,” they sat like that until they both fell asleep, this time, and the grey twilight closed in around both of them equally. Potter didn’t vanish off on his own.  
  
Draco thought some memory of that peace remained with him when he woke up, even though it slipped through his fingers like dust immediately.  
  
He had need of it. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the Dark Lord looming by his bed.


	5. A Dark Lord

Draco wasn’t stupid. He immediately scrambled out of bed and onto the floor, where he bowed his forehead down until it rested between his hands. Maybe that wasn’t  _exactly_ what the Dark Lord wanted, but he would tell Draco better in a moment if he didn’t, and probably let Draco  _feel_ his displeasure, too.  
  
The Dark Lord stood motionless. Well, Draco thought he might hear the creak of dry and ancient tendons in his neck as he tilted his head to look down at Draco, but he didn’t think so—and he tried to banish the thought of “dry and ancient” the minute he had it, even though his eyes were pressed against the floorboards and the Dark Lord couldn’t read his mind.  
  
Snape had risked his life to save Draco’s. His mother could still be hurt. Draco had to remember that.  
  
“Elwood tells me that you have performed unexpectedly well in your new task.”  
  
Draco trembled at the papery sound of that voice. Perhaps he hadn’t been meant to do well. Perhaps he should have done badly because the Dark Lord had assigned him to Elwood as a punishment and that meant he was supposed to simply fall down and die.  
  
Not being able to read the Dark Lord’s mind in return or guess his intentions didn’t matter. You still had to obey his will.  
  
 _And banish traitorous thoughts._ Like the one that asked why he had ever thought he wanted to serve this madman.  
  
“You are to answer,” said the Dark Lord, and one of his hands came down and settled like a prong on the back of Draco’s neck. Draco spoke in a gabbling rush, anything to concentrate on something besides the hand.  
  
“Yes, my lord. I enjoy the work, my lord. It’s fascinating, my Lord. Elwood has taught me that I can kill, my lord. I see now—”  
  
“Enough,” said the Dark Lord, and for a moment, Draco had the sensation of hanging above a pit crawling with vipers. Then the sensation ended, spell-induced, and Draco shuddered and was silent.  
  
The silence continued long past the time he expected more punishment, making him want to sneak a look up. He would have done that if this was his father testing him, because the test would have been to assert his independence after a reasonable interval. Nothing was supposed to be able to tame the heir to the Malfoy line and properties, even the head of the family.  
  
But the man in front of him was the reason that there would be no more tests like that, no more head of the family unless Draco got out of here and survived. Draco held down his impatience, like he had the fear and the despair and so many other emotions about being here, and waited.  
  
“There is other work for you,” the Dark Lord said abruptly, and Draco followed the departure of the hand and stood up. He kept his head bowed, but it seemed this time, he’d gauged the Dark Lord’s intentions correctly, and he merely received the order, “Go and seek out Rodolphus. He awaits you in the small dining room.”  
  
 _Bellatrix’s husband. He’s putting me with the husband of the woman I killed._  
  
But Draco knew he could hardly say that. Of course the Dark Lord was going to do things like that, because he could, and because he probably still blamed Draco for the loss of a servant he’d valued more than he valued Draco.  
  
“My Lord,” said Draco, and bowed even lower, his hair scraping the floor, before he stood up and hurried out of his room. He was just in time. His stomach had rumbled, and the reminder that this despised Death Eater was mortal and needed some nourishment probably would have infuriated the Dark Lord even more.  
  
*  
  
“We’re going to invent a new torture spell.”  
  
Rodolphus had announced that the minute Draco walked through the door to the dining room, and then he’d said nothing else. Instead, he’d had Draco lay out all sorts of things that didn’t seem to have much to do with the work of inventing a new spell: pallets on the floor, ropes hung from hooks on the wall that Draco hadn’t seen the last time he’d been in this room, pendulums of steel that hung from the ceiling, and shards of glass that Draco had placed on the floor. He had tried to be clever and careful with his fingers, but of course he’d been cut and his blood dripped out.  
  
He kept his head bowed, though, and stayed silent. He was determined to give Rodolphus no cause for offense. He might find one anyway, but neither Snape nor his mum would be able to say that Draco was stupid and had provoked him.  
  
“Now came into the middle of the room and turn to face me,” said Rodolphus. He had been lounging in one of the dining room chairs—what  _had_ been one of the dining room chairs, once upon a time—watching Draco with his fist propped up under his chin. Now he flicked his wand, and half the glass shards on the floor sprang up and hovered near Draco.  
  
Draco didn’t think he suppressed a nervous flicker of his eyes towards the glass shards, but he managed to keep himself from dwelling on them. He looked at Rodolphus, at the eyes that burned with hatred towards him, and nothing else.  
  
“Do you know what my Bella was to me?” whispered Rodolphus, idly toying with his wand as if caressing it. “Do you understand how special she was to me? How the thought of how much she needed me kept me sane in Azkaban?”  
  
There was nothing to be said to that, and Draco didn’t try. He stood there, and Rodolphus rose and prowled slowly back and forth in front of him, his wand tapping against the edge of his palm. Draco kept his eyes fastened firmly on the wall behind Rodolphus.  
  
“You don’t understand how special she was to me,” said Rodolphus, and he was breathing fast and the pupils of his eyes stood out in a way that Draco didn’t think any pupils should, “because no one can. No one can grasp how special she was to me who wasn’t there in Azkaban with us.”  
  
He strode up to Draco and stopped right in front of him, rocking back and forth a little. “I was there,” he breathed. “We sat there and clung to our faith in our Lord, and we knew he would come and rescue us, and so he did. And Bella never doubted. She was the fire of my faith, the kindler of my fire.”  
  
Draco had to look into Rodolphus’s eyes. They were there, and they were creepily fascinating, and at the moment, Draco was thinking that they might be the last thing he saw before he died. Of course he had to look.  
  
Rodolphus reached up and touched Draco’s chin almost gently, as if he was imploring him to look. But whether or not he was, Draco had already plunged past his surface thoughts into the depths of his mind, without meaning to. Involuntary Legilimency happened like that sometimes, and Draco had been taught by the woman Rodolphus was chanting the praises of. It would have been more surprising if it  _hadn’t_ happened.  
  
Images swam past Draco, and then straightened out. He was standing in the middle of a small, cramped stone room with Rodolphus rocking back and forth on the floor in front of him, and from the other side of the nearest wall came endless shrieks.  
  
Draco backed away, until his back hit the wall the shrieks were coming from. He shut his eyes, and opened them again. But he was still in the midst of a memory that took place in Azkaban, and he could still only recognize Rodolphus because it was what Rodolphus had been talking about. This withered man with the scraggly beard and the burning black eyes wouldn’t have been familiar to him if he hadn’t just heard about it.  
  
The sobbing shrieks sounded like pure Bellatrix, however. And as Draco listened, they became words, words that bounced and echoed in Draco’s mind the way they had once echoed in Rodolphus’s.  
  
“My lord trusts me! My lord  _trusts me!_  My lord loves me! My lord will come for me! He will be here soon! He will—”  
  
And then the memory mercifully ended as Rodolphus thrust Draco from his mind. Draco struggled, staggered, and ended up with his back against a different wall, one that he at least knew was real. He placed his hand flat there and stood in the midst of the thunder of his heart.  
  
Oddly enough, he thought of how strange it was to hear the voice of a woman he had killed. And then he wondered if Rodolphus had minded hearing his wife call out for the Dark Lord when he was right next door and unable to touch her or help her.  
  
Rodolphus lifted his head slowly. Draco braced himself. If Rodolphus figured out that Draco had been in his mind, he might well kill him. On the other hand, for people not trained in Legilimency, it was possible for it to just feel like recalling a particularly vivid memory.  
  
He hoped Rodolphus was untrained in Legilimency. He prayed for it.  
  
“My Lord hasn’t granted me license to kill you,” Rodolphus whispered gently. “It seems that he thinks you might still be of some use with Elwood’s project. But he told me I could do whatever else I wanted to you.” He turned his wand slowly around, looking down at it as though it was a beloved pet.  
  
Then he looked up and gave Draco a version of the same smile. “And so, you’re going to help me develop the torture spell. Stand still.”  
  
*  
  
This time, when he came into the grey dreamscape and his memories returned, bobbing up and down in his head like rubbish in the river, Draco made his way to the water and flung himself into it.  
  
The cold swept all over his body and made him gasp and shiver, but it also did the thing he had been hoping for: it cleansed him. He had thought it might, after the way the taste of it made his mouth feel. Draco gulped and clawed his way back to the surface before he could drown—he didn’t even want to imagine what would happen if he drowned in a dream—and then stood there with his head bowed and his clothes streaming.  
  
“You look even worse than I do.”  
  
Draco tipped his head in dull acknowledgement of Potter’s arrival. The horrors he had endured under Rodolphus’s hands were fading away, but he didn’t think that the pain echoing along his nerves would be much touched. How could this place keep him sane when he forgot about it every time he woke up?  
  
He waded back to the shore where Potter stood and flopped down, his head in his hands. Potter stirred awkwardly from foot to foot, then finally cleared his throat and sat down silently beside Draco.  
  
“Can I do anything?” he asked.  
  
Draco stared at him. “You’re the hunted enemy of the Dark Lord,” he said. “And you’re asking if you can do anything.”  
  
“Yes.” Potter gazed at him steadily, his arms still folded on his knees. “I told you, you look worse than I feel. I’m going on a nearly impossible quest, but I don’t think that you’re on a quest. You’re trying to survive.”  
  
“Then consider life my goal,” Draco snapped, and closed his eyes. He wasn’t in the mood to debate with Potter tonight, even about something as intangible as his survival. He ached. He wanted to absorb as much of the grey atmosphere and the flowing stream as he could and carry it back into the real world.  
  
“What happened?” Potter asked, bringing him back and anchoring him to the greyness.  
  
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Draco.  
  
“I think you need to.”  
  
“What do you know about what I  _need_?” Draco knew he had no wand here, but he reached for it anyway. Then his hand fell limp and exhausted at his side, and he dipped his head and kept on speaking, but his words were purest rubbish, he thought. “Because I’ve been used as a component in a torture spell, and I’ve had pieces of glass flung at my eyes that almost put them out, and I’ve been strung up like a side of meat, and I’ve had to lie down and watch pendulums that were going to cut through my skin and bone swinging closer and closer. And all the time, Rodolphus Lestrange watched and pretended to make notes and  _laughed_.”  
  
“Because you killed his wife,” Potter murmured.  
  
“No, because I killed his favorite Kneazle,” Draco snapped back. “Of  _course_ because of that. Although it probably didn’t help that I slipped into his memories and heard Bellatrix ranting in Azkaban about how much she trusted the Dark Lord, and then I had to wonder how Rodolphus felt, knowing that Bellatrix wanted the Dark Lord and not him.” Draco shuddered and put his hands over his face. The grey land wasn’t doing its job this evening. “I’m not sure which one he tortured me for.”  
  
Potter caught his breath, and said nothing. Draco blinked and turned to him. “Your sympathy dries up quickly.”  
  
“Not that,” said Potter, and he was looking at the river with eyes like stars. “I should have thought of it before.  _He_ wants to hide things that are important to him. Where would he hide them? With someone he trusted. Absolutely. Someone who was more devoted to him than to her own husband.” He turned and clutched Draco’s hand. “Do you know if your aunt had any hiding places? Any place where she would have put something she didn’t want the Aurors to find?”  
  
Draco shook his hand a little, but not hard. He didn’t want to let go of Potter’s comforting touch, as small as it was. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I really doubt it. She would have given up all her houses when she was arrested. They would have searched any place she mentioned to anyone else—and a  _lot_ of the Death Eaters didn’t stay loyal and gave evidence, so the Aurors would have known. It’s not like they could break into her Gringotts vault, but other than that—”  
  
Potter whooped and bent forwards, grabbing Draco so hard that Draco’s shoulders ached from the embrace. “Thanks, Malfoy! You might have just saved a lot of lives!” He jumped up and bolted across the grass towards whatever point he went when he disappeared on ordinary nights, calling over his shoulder, “And made it possible to defeat Voldemort!”  
  
Potter winked out like a fading flame, and left Draco blinking at river and grey mist with a pleasantly numb sensation. He’d take it, he thought. It had been a day since he’d felt a pleasant anything.  
  
So he sat alone, by that grey, flowing river, and gradually some of the memory of the pain left him, and his breathing calmed down, and he found himself flexing his hands slightly and smiling a little.   
  
He couldn’t live without pain. He might not even survive this new purpose that the Dark Lord had told him he had to fulfill. Rodolphus might decide to kill him after all. He might go too far and kill him accidentally. The Dark Lord could change his mind the next day, decide Draco was a danger instead of a liability, and use the Killing Curse on him himself.  
  
But there was this place, and this place was untouchable. And without even meaning to, with nothing to report on except the pain he had suffered, Draco had somehow helped Potter with his quest.  
  
He wasn’t useless. If he died, he wouldn’t have lived to no purpose.  
  
And so he sat there, musing on that fact that he would forget when he woke up, and which would have to burn like a star somewhere in the back of his mind, making his life worthwhile in the way that service to the Dark Lord never had.


	6. A Light

“I require young Mr. Malfoy’s help with my spells.”  
  
Draco stood there with his head bowed and his eyes fastened on his feet, not daring to breathe loudly. He had gone to Rodolphus Lestrange again this morning, only to find Elwood there claiming that the Dark Lord had promised Draco could help him with  _his_ research.  
  
Draco clenched his hands. He didn’t want to murder people or torture them, but—he hesitated to admit this—it was better than suffering himself.  
  
“And our Lord promised that  _I_ could have him, for the vengeance-debt.” Rodolphus spun his wand the way he had the other day, but his eyes promised cold revenge on Elwood, not the fire he had showed Draco. “It’s important that he understand exactly what he did in depriving me of my wife, and that he  _never_ do it again.” He tilted his head towards Draco, and Draco looked down quickly before he could meet the madman’s eyes.  
  
“What does your wife matter?” Elwood made a little motion with his hand. “She’s dead. We have the living to hunt down.”  
  
Draco said nothing. Neither of them, so far, had asked for his opinion. And as long as he was still alive, he knew he could do something. He wasn’t entirely sure  _how_ he would bring down the Dark Lord, but it felt as if he had plans and a way to do it, despite everything.  
  
“Come here and say that,” Rodolphus said, and rose up in a single swift motion from the table in the middle of the torture room he had summoned Draco to.  
  
Draco tensed his legs, but didn’t move away from them yet. That would only attract attention. Instead, he concentrated on smoothing out his breathing so it didn’t sound harsh and draw their attention  _that_ way.   
  
“You have no idea who I am.” Elwood’s voice was strong and confident, utterly unlike either Rodolphus’s hiss or the trembling whisper Draco knew  _he_ would have used if he’d tried to use the same words himself. Elwood didn’t even draw his wand, only watched Rodolphus. “The task that our Lord has given me is the most important one. I will bring down Harry Potter, and I will do it with the help of this expendable idiot who has turned out to be surprisingly good at torture.”  
  
Draco wished he could allow himself to feel comforted. But thinking about Elwood’s work and the way that he didn’t know if Elwood would win this confrontation, he couldn’t. Rodolphus would just take out his temper on Draco if  _he_  succeeded in winning.  
  
“Let us go to our Lord, then.” Rodolphus’s eyes glowed like the eyes of a mad rat Draco had once found in a deserted corner of the Manor. “If you have the courage to ask him for Draco Malfoy, then—”  
  
“He has already asked me.”  
  
The Dark Lord’s presence filled the room like cold smoke. Draco fell helplessly to his knees, followed a moment later by the other two, and heard the Dark Lord laugh. The noise sounded as if it came from a dead throat.  
  
 _Why did I ever think this was the path to glory?_ Draco knew he should keep his thoughts subdued, bound back, broken, that enough people had taken enough risks for him, but ones like this kept insisting on slipping across his mind. He didn’t know  _why,_ but there they were, and his face was helplessly pale and cold, and his hands shook.  
  
“Elwood is doing a great work,” said the Dark Lord chidingly to Rodolphus, and Draco saw the white hand stretch out from its dark sleeve towards Rodolphus’s face. Draco bent his head further, until his hair shut out the vision. “You are not. What are you doing, but trying to avenge someone too weak to fight off a teenager?”  
  
Rodolphus tried to say something, but choked in response. Draco knew that the hatred he felt wouldn’t be directed at the Dark Lord, though. It would all come back to Draco, and the Dark Lord would test his followers in the way, and rejoice when he found out who the strong ones and the weak ones were.   
  
 _It’s political manipulation. It has nothing to do with finding the ones who are most_ worthy.  _It’s there to amuse him and see who would die for him._  
  
His father had told him as much with lesser political figures, like the Minister. It was how politics worked, in general. But his father had never once mentioned that the same simple concepts could apply to the exalted Dark Lord.  
  
The Dark Lord’s face turned towards Draco. Draco cringed, hoping it was the right thing to do. The Dark Lord wanted weakness, wanted loyalty, but there were those unexpected moments when he also wanted strength.  
  
“Draco,” said the Dark Lord tenderly, “I have a request to make of you.”  
  
At least Draco knew the proper response to that one, no matter what the Dark Lord currently thought of him. He lifted his head at once and said, in a soft voice, “Anything that you wish, my Lord.”  
  
“This young one could give you an example of loyalty and promptness to respond to, Rodolphus,” said the Dark Lord. Draco’s heart shook with despair when he thought of what would happen the next time he met Rodolphus, but he kept his eyes obediently on his Lord’s face anyway. At least thoughts of fear and terror were likely to please the Dark Lord.  
  
That pale figure swiveled back to regard Draco, and the long, claw-like hands made an almost delicate gesture in the air. “I want you, Draco…”  
  
“Yes, my Lord?” Draco despised himself for the breathless edge to his voice, but the Dark Lord was like that. He could make you want to serve him even as you despised yourself for the desire. Draco knew that was why his father had followed him.  
  
 _Father…_  
  
The grief welled and nearly blocked his ears, but then the Dark Lord said the one thing that could have made Draco pay the utmost attention. “You will restrain your mother from begging me for your life.”  
  
Draco bowed at once, one hand over his heart. He knew his elbow was cocked awkwardly against the floor and the Dark Lord might not see it, but Draco did it anyway. “Of course, my Lord. I will remind her that our lives are yours, and you are the only one who can grant whether they will continue or not.”  
  
The Dark Lord gave a chuckle like the squeak of a hinge on a gate, and laid his hand on Draco’s hair. Worms couldn’t have felt more disgusting squirming on the back of his neck, but Draco didn’t look up. He wouldn’t dare.  
  
All the while, his heart hammered and his mind screamed.  _Mother, Mother, what did you do? What did he do to you?_  
  
“You are most refreshingly obedient, after your first great failure,” the Dark Lord mused. “Perhaps I will reverse the spell I put on her after all.”  
  
“Your choice, my Lord,” Draco said, his voice and will to survive shaping the words while the soul of him was contorted and writhing in agony. He knew the Dark Lord could cast spells that others couldn’t, because of the sheer knowledge or power that was needed. He wanted to go to his mother at once.  
  
But he would make things worse for her if he did. He had to remind himself of that.  
  
For a second, the wriggling fingers tightened in his hair, and then the Dark Lord stepped back and nodded, looking pleased. “It is. Do not forget it. For today, you will work with Elwood.”  
  
 _He didn’t say it would be permanently,_ the small part of Draco that could spare attention for his own plight from his mother’s reminded him. But Draco stood with his gaze on the floor, and nodded. “Yes, my Lord.”  
  
“The young can instruct their elders, sometimes,” the Dark Lord said, with another grating chuckle, and swept out again.  
  
“Indeed they can,” said Elwood, and jerked his head sideways at Draco. Draco followed Elwood out of the dining room, and didn’t look back when Rodolphus said something in a voice that promised him no good. Nothing in his ancestral home promised him much good right now. He would ignore the threats except when they were in front of him.  
  
Or when they were to his mother.  
  
 _Mother, what did you do?_  
  
*  
  
It wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon that Elwood told Draco he had no more work for him to do, as the next bit of the spell was a tricky one and he had to settle it by himself, and Draco ducked away, first to the dining room where he grabbed a bit of bread and cheese to give himself an excuse for wandering, and then up to the room where he thought his mother might be. Not the suite of rooms his parents had used for years, of course. The Dark Lord had taken those, and pushed his mother into this smaller, plainer set.  
  
 _Mother,_ Draco thought, and knocked on the door. There was a soft sound from behind it, like a groan, except it didn’t deserve that name because it didn’t have enough breath.  
  
Draco had never heard his mother make even an  _ordinary_ grunt or groan, though, and he was light-headed with despair. “Mother?” he whispered, and knocked again.  
  
This time, there was a noise as though someone had tried to walk and had fallen. Heart so hard that it felt as though it was being forced down his throat instead of up, Draco kicked the door open and hurried inside.  
  
His mother lay on the floor. When Draco turned her gently over, he saw that her hair had gone white. Her face was visibly lined with wrinkles, and the hands that reached out to him were spotted with brown and lines of grey.  
  
“It’s the Aging Curse,” said his mother, and closed her eyes. Two teeth, loosened from her gums, fell out and lay on the carpet beside her.  
  
Draco, trembling, managed to urge his mother back into the bed. He knew the Aging Curse could be ended and all the damage it had done would go with it, but he didn’t know the countercurse. And ending it before the Dark Lord decided that it would be ended would be a bad idea, anyway.  
  
“What happened?” Draco asked, and sat beside his mother. Her hand found his, so delicate that Draco thought he could break the bones if he pressed too hard. Veins of blue threaded it the way they did some of the marble in the Manor.  
  
“I—was begging him to reconsider assigning you to Rodolphus.” His mother coughed, painfully, and her gums began to bleed. “He did this to me.”  
  
Draco felt as though someone had taken a large splinter of ice and plunged it into his chest. They had transfixed his heart, he thought, calm and numb. And they had transfixed, at the same time, his fear.   
  
There was only so far he could go being afraid of the Dark Lord, maybe, no matter what the Dark Lord did, before the fear turned to rage. That had happened after he watched his father die, but it was happening anew now. It filled him with an oddly transparent aching. It felt as though someone had not only jabbed him with the ice but with the ability to see himself from a distance.  
  
He had held back when his father died because he had worried for Narcissa. And now the worst had happened anyway, and it turned out that nothing he did could save his mother from getting killed or suffering.  
  
Maybe he ought to have known that after the failure of his plan to spare his parents from suffering by living up to the Dark Lord’s orders. He had managed to tell himself it was only because he had failed to kill Dumbledore that they were in danger. Live up to the Dark Lord’s orders, and they wouldn’t be harmed.  
  
But his father had died anyway. His mother had been harmed.  
  
 _He rewards competence and punishes failure,_ his father had said to Draco years ago, when he was discussing the Dark Lord’s return. But that wasn’t true. He punished all sorts of things, and he never forgave a failure, and Draco and his mother were bound in a state of dependence where seeing the other one hurt was worse than suffering themselves.  
  
The Dark Lord would call that the weakness of love, Draco was certain. He’d heard him speak of it before, almost barking the words, using them to flay his servants when they couldn’t conquer the simplest of the Order of the Phoenix.  
  
But Draco thought it was a strength, now.  
  
His hand tightened on his mother’s when the door opened, but it was Snape. He carried a black vial that he brought over to the bed and immediately tilted down Narcissa’s throat. Draco tensed, but then relaxed when he recognized it. The Strengthening Draught. It would prevent his mother—hopefully—from dying of age-related complications before the Dark Lord took away the curse.  
  
“What will your excuse be?” Draco whispered before Snape left.  
  
Snape cocked an eye at him. “Taking thought that my Lord need not,” he said smoothly. “He would not want a pleasing toy to die when he might want to play with her still.” And he stepped out and shut the door behind him.  
  
Draco closed his eyes and swallowed. At least Snape could take care of himself. That was one less person  _Draco_ had to worry about, although he wasn’t sure whether he could get rid of the emotions entirely.   
  
But he would make this work. He would find a solution for his mother’s problem, and he would make sure that he did it in a way that harmed the Dark Lord, even if at first he had to cower and beg and make it seem like he was intimidated by the all-powerful beast in the way that all the rest of the Death Eaters were.  
  
And he would make sure that, as far as the Dark Lord’s death went, he was in at the kill.  
  
*  
  
This time, Draco was waiting for Potter when he appeared on the bank of the river, and he gave Potter no time to ask questions. He asked instead, his voice spilling eagerly into the question that had come to him the instant he opened his eyes in this twilight country and remembered that he  _could_ come here and oppose the bloody Dark Lord.  
  
“What are you searching for? What does it have to do with defeating him?”  
  
Potter paused with his mouth a little open, then closed it, and blinked, and answered, “I don’t think I should tell you.”  
  
Draco waved an impatient hand. “Snape hid this object and the memories it provokes in my head so well that I never think of them when I’m awake. You don’t have to be worried about  _him_  finding out about this. He would have done it already. And you don’t have to worry about me betraying you because I chose to, either. He cursed my mother with aging today. I want him  _dead_. I want to know how you’re going to  _make_ him dead. I want to help.”  
  
“Cursed your mother with aging?” Potter repeated, a little blankly.  
  
Draco would have taken the time to be bleakly amused at that, how Potter had seen so many awful things—like a bloody basilisk charging straight at him with its mouth open—and could still be scandalized by something like this. But he didn’t have the time. He just nodded and said, “He cursed her to be older. Her teeth are falling out. So’s her hair. And she has heart problems, and problems with her bones and joints.”  
  
“That’s  _horrible_.”  
  
Maybe Draco could make Potter’s innocence work for him, here. He gave another impatient tap with his hand on the ground. “Focus, Potter. What are you looking for? How can I help?”  
  
Potter visibly shook off the questions he wanted to ask, himself. “I don’t see how you can, since you forget about this every time you wake up.”  
  
“If I show that I want to help, I think Snape will know what to do.” Draco knew the excuse was weak, but he clung to it as the one bright and shining hope that could bring light to his life right now, or to this grey country. “What are you doing?”  
  
Potter watched him in silence for long minutes. Draco waited, the only thing he could do. Potter was the one who had to judge him, and make a decision.  
  
And slowly, Potter told him about the Horcruxes. He didn’t elaborate on what all of them were or exactly how the Dark Lord had made them, but at the end of their conversation, Draco knew that they were keeping the Dark Lord immortal. That Potter had used the clue Draco had given him in their last conversation—how much the Dark Lord had valued Bellatrix—to determine that a Horcrux was probably in the Lestranges’ Gringotts vault. They’d already retrieved a few of the Horcruxes, a locket and a diadem, with the help of other members of the Order of the Phoenix, and Moody had died trying to destroy the diadem.  
  
Draco turned around to the dusk when Potter had vanished, and told himself two things. First, there was no way that Nagini wasn’t a Horcrux; the Dark Lord valued her too much, and kept her closer even than his wand, sometimes. Draco had seen him sit at the table in the dining room with his wand a meter away from him and Nagini coiled in his lap.  
  
Second, he would see if a desire could survive the transition between his sleep and waking in the way that a memory couldn’t.


	7. A Desire

"Draco." The Dark Lord's voice was deep and soft, and he moved in a prowling circle around Draco's crouching body. "You will tell me why I should remove the Aging Curse from your mother, instead of merely inflicting it on you for having the temerity to question my judgment."  
  
Draco huddled. He could feel the Dark Lord's footsteps on the hem of his robes, on his outer boots, sometimes on his fingers. He didn't dare move. He could feel, for one thing, Nagini lovingly echoing all her master's movements, down to the looping circle of her body where it wound about Draco. He shuddered.  
  
But it was important for him to remain close to Nagini, and to get the Aging Curse taken off his mother at the same time.  
  
"I can offer you an amusement in place of the amusement that you received from inflicting the curse on my mother, my Lord," he whispered.  
  
"Can you?" The Dark Lord came to a stop and cocked his hand by his ear in a listening posture. "What is it?"  
  
Draco lifted his head and looked into the Dark Lord's eyes. His voice shook, and he no longer worried about the hatred that the Dark Lord might see in his face. He would probably find the hatred funny, too. "I wish to work with your snake, my Lord." That desire burned pure and true and sincere, at least.  
  
Nagini came to a stop when the Dark Lord reached down and placed a long, pale hand on her head. "My Nagini?" the Dark Lord murmured, aware and polished, intent, as he leaned over Draco. "Why is that, I wonder? You are not a Parselmouth yourself. You will not tell me that you _possess_ this rare gift?"  
  
Draco shuddered, just imagining the chaos that would explode if he was a Parselmouth and had been hiding that from the Dark Lord. Seeing it reflected in his eyes, the Dark Lord chuckled and shook his head.  
  
"No, you are not. And you would provide only one meal for her, which you would become in any case if I commanded it." The Dark Lord casually stroked down the back of Nagini's neck, eyes still testing and teasing Draco. "Therefore, why?"  
  
Draco shuddered and remembered some of the spells he had cast at Elwood's direction on the Muggles and wizards waiting to be siphoned into his machine. "My Lord, I think Harry Potter will come after her."  
  
The Dark Lord froze, with a lack of motion that Draco thought only a wild animal could have echoed. And then he reached out, one hand curling under Draco's chin and dragging him up to his feet with only that hold. Draco struggled instinctively against the pressure of the Dark Lord's fingernails on his windpipe, and then he went still again when he felt a long rustle of scales by his feet, and saw how they got wrapped up. Even his tremors felt as if they were being sucked back into his body.  
  
"What do you know?" The Dark Lord shook Draco hard enough to make his eyes water. "How do you know it?"  
  
"My Lord," Draco gasped, and the Dark Lord finally seemed to realize that Draco was having trouble speaking in his present position, because he tossed him contemptuously to the floor. Draco bent over so his lips scraped the stone, although not enough to block his speech, which would be even worse. "I know that Harry Potter is a Parselmouth. I was thinking about that. No one else seems to take note of it, except your majestic self. What if he comes after this beautiful lady here?"  
  
It took more effort than almost anything else to call Nagini "beautiful," to think of what she did that way. But when he looked down, Draco could see the flat shimmer of firelight on her scales, and that was beautiful in its own way. He wasn't going to say that she was ugly, at least.  
  
The Dark Lord paced slowly towards him. "You think he might?"  
  
"There were rumors that he killed a basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets in our second year," Draco gasped. Those rumors _had_ existed, and anyone the Dark Lord questioned about them--at least, anyone who knew about the state of affairs in Hogwarts--would be able to confirm the truth. "He seems dedicated to ridding the world of magical snakes, instead of cherishing them as you do. I was thinking last night, and the notion troubled me. I hoped that--I hoped that I might be chosen to protect your lady."  
  
That was the best reason he had been able to come up with, but then, it was hard to think of another one when he only had the steady _conviction_ that he had to come up with a way to be near Nagini, instead of a reason why. The desire had been pounding in his blood all morning. What he would do with it, he hadn't known until now.  
  
The Dark Lord was silent. Then he turned and cast Floo powder into the fire, calling out, "Severus!"   
  
Draco ducked his head further. He had done what he could, and now Nagini herself slowly made the circle around him, hissing threateningly into his ear. He hoped that the Dark Lord might lift the curse if Draco proved himself devoted enough, or amusing enough. It would probably have to be the latter.  
  
And he was close to Nagini, if this succeeded. He had no idea what he would do _now,_ but one purpose was accomplished.  
  
The graceful, black-robed figure appearing in the corner of Draco's eye a moment later proved that Professor Snape had arrived. He fell at once to his knees, and Draco experienced a moment's weary conviction that _he_ would never do that as gracefully, himself. "My Lord? You desired my presence?"  
  
And Professor Snape even sounded absolutely loyal and committed. Draco was starting to think he should have asked for lessons in acting, all these years, instead of Potions.  
  
"Yes," said the Dark Lord, and Draco saw the shadow of one pale finger jab at him. "Young Malfoy claims that rumors circulated of Harry Potter's defeat of a basilisk in his second year. Is that true?"  
  
Professor Snape was silent for long moments. Draco knew why. He wanted to know how to twist this situation to his best advantage, or how to survive it. What the best thing was to say, and what the right thing.  
  
"Yes, my Lord," said Snape at last. He could hardly have replied otherwise, Draco knew. He had heard the rumors from Professor Snape himself, although only in the context of ridicule directed at Potter and the exaggerated ideas of his prowess as a hero during one of their private Potions lessons. "The claim was that he had descended into the Chamber of Secrets when the basilisk took the Weasleys' youngest child and rescued her by slaying the basilisk."  
  
"How was he supposed to have accomplished this feat?" The Dark Lord sounded as though he was speaking through an iron wall, but Draco still twitched, although keeping his eyes fervently fastened on the floor. There was something in that tone, iron wall or not, that he had never heard before.  
  
Something that sounded like a whisper of fear.  
  
"Dumbledore's phoenix, my Lord," said Professor Snape, which was more detail than he had ever given Draco. "He brought the Sword of Gryffindor to Potter, and with the Sword, he killed the snake. The phoenix also wept on a wound that he had received from the basilisk, and apparently stopped the venom from consuming him."  
  
 _Of course that's the way it happened. Bloody Potter._ Draco felt weariness creeping like a disease through his blood. Potter had all the luck, and Draco could have used only a fraction of it, and it was denied to him. His parents suffered because Potter couldn't share the bloody luck or defeat the Dark Lord when he _should_ have.  
  
"Then it is not rumors," said the Dark Lord harshly. "It is truth."  
  
"So _Dumbledore_ confirmed it before I slew him, my Lord." Snape spoke the name with loathing.  
  
" _Crucio_ ," snarled the Dark Lord, and Snape flew to the floor, struggling with the pain curse. Draco crouched there, and didn't look up or tremble or allow himself to show sympathy. He had already learned that such signs would only make the Dark Lord exacerbate the torture, because he claimed that all his followers should be "strong," not "weak" enough to feel for someone else.  
  
 _Except that he also wants us to be weak enough to fear him,_ Draco thought, and bowed his head further. _Or sometimes he wants us to watch while he tortures the others, so that we can understand and envy his supreme power._  
  
For the moment, the Dark Lord neither indicated that he wanted Draco to watch or stopped torturing Snape. It was much longer than Draco was comfortable with until he actually go to that point, and when he lifted the spell, Draco heard soft whimpers coming from the professor. That made him close his eyes, because he didn't want to humiliate Snape by looking at his disgrace, his moment of weakness.  
  
"You should have told me this _at once,_ " the Dark Lord hissed, pacing back and forth in front of Snape. "I should have known that my enemy was such a powerful Parselmouth that he could fight a basilisk and win!"  
  
Draco kept his mouth shut. Even though he had used that as part of his lie, he actually had no idea how being a Parselmouth would have given Potter an advantage in killing a basilisk. Maybe you could listen to it while it muttered about eating you, but you knew it wanted to eat you anyway.  
  
Of course, he hadn't _had_ to come up with a justification. The Dark Lord's paranoia had done the rest.   
  
"I apologize, my Lord." Snape's voice was steady, and already the whimpers were gone as if they'd never been. He rolled back onto his knees and bowed, like Draco was doing, his teeth against the stone. "I should have done so. I did not. The fault is entirely mine."  
  
The Dark Lord paused, wavering. Draco held his breath. Sometimes tactics like the one Snape was using worked to appease him, and other times he suspected the appeasement and lashed out all the harder.  
  
For now, though, he seemed to have accepted that Snape meant it. He nodded once. "You will report any other rumors concerning Potter down his Hogwarts years to me," he demanded. "You will compile a list of them and give it to me by nightfall."  
  
"Yes, my Lord," said Snape, but made no motion to rise until the Dark Lord gestured with an impatient snap of his fingers. Then Snape stood, backed out of the room, and came to a stop at the door, bowing again before he left. Draco wondered why he didn't go back through the Floo, but he reckoned that perhaps Snape meant to and would just do it when he was out of the Dark Lord's line of sight.  
  
Then said Dark Lord turned around again, and Draco cowered, feeling no need to _pretend_ to fear as it squirmed through his belly.  
  
"You, boy," said the Dark Lord, and he gave Draco a terrifying grin that showed long, slender front teeth like a viper's fangs. Draco didn't know when that had happened, since the last he knew, the Dark Lord had normal teeth, but he wasn't about to question it. "You will have the position you begged for. _You_ are in charge of protecting Nagini, and I will be waiting if someone gets past you."  
  
Draco bowed himself and murmured thanks again, and then stood, painfully. Not as painfully as Snape had, though, or as his mother would right this minute. He thought of begging for his mother's release from the curse again, but he didn't. He would have to hope that the Dark Lord was well-disposed enough to him to--  
  
"I will release your mother from the Aging Curse," said the Dark Lord, striding for the door. "I do not want you distracted as you guard Nagini." He added something else in Parseltongue that made the great snake lift her head and look at Draco in a straightforward way that he knew snakes seldom did. Her tongue came out thoughtfully.  
  
"You will be her meal in the event of something going wrong," the Dark Lord said, and vanished.  
  
Draco murmured his thanks, and then bent his gaze on Nagini, who considered him with a subtly flicking tail.  
  
How did one entertain a snake?  
  
*  
  
"You've managed to get close to Nagini?" That was Potter's tone of surprise, Draco thought, and he turned around to face him with a haughty little lift of his chin. He had given his most important news while looking out over the river. For one thing, he was the one who had come up with and executed this plan, even if he couldn't remember why he had done it when he was doing it. Let Potter come up and sit beside him and catch _his_ eye for once.  
  
For another, he wanted to see if Potter would actually remain pleasant if he was the one who had to do most of the work. But it seemed he would. He sat down next to Draco on the bank of the river and shook his head in wondering amusement that Draco could see even when he was mostly looking away.  
  
" _That's wonderful._ "  
  
Draco breathed in exactly as if the air of this twilight country possessed some remarkable cleansing property like its water, although he didn't think it did. He hadn't realized, until he heard them, how long part of him had been waiting to hear Harry Potter say something like those words to him, and mean it.  
  
"So," he said, turning to Potter. "The one thing I don't think I can do is get her out of here. You're going to have to come up with some way to get into the Manor. How's your quest for those other objects going?"  
  
"We have a few of them now." Potter darted a look at him, then around the grey country and trees. Draco rolled his eyes.  
  
"I told you, the Dark Lord would have found out about this now if he could find out about it. And you can trust Snape."  
  
"Can we?" Potter muttered, but shook his head before Draco could protest. "I know you're right. It's--a lot more complicated than I thought it was, the way he killed Dumbledore." He looked at Draco. "How about your mum?"  
  
"She's still in pain, but he lifted the Aging Curse." Draco leaned over to dip one hand in the water. "Don't think that means I hate him less, Potter. I still plan to help you defeat him and kill him." _If I can._  
  
Potter nodded once. "Well. We have two more of the objects now, and we're trying to come up with a way to destroy them that's safer than the way we had to use with the diadem, which killed Moody." He sighed and turned to Draco. "I suppose you don't know safe ways of utterly annihilating Dark objects?"  
  
Draco shrugged. "Not safe. I know plenty of ways of annihilation, now." He couldn't even analyze the tone in his own voice. It was blank and neutral, maybe. "If I wanted to get rid of something dangerous and make sure it never came back, I'd use Fiendfyre. But that's not safe."  
  
"What 's Fiendfyre?"  
  
Draco stared at Potter. He wanted to ask how Potter had come this far in life without hearing about it, but when he considered, he supposed it was the sort of incantation that Dark families were a lot more likely to show their children than Light families. And Potter, growing up in the Muggle world, wouldn't have heard of most of the magic not taught at Hogwarts.  
  
"It's an incantation that calls a kind of demonic fire," Draco said, and coughed into his hand. He hoped Potter would take his disbelief for something else. "The fire forms all sorts of shapes, beasts and faces, and it's very hard to put out. You have to be careful when you use it."  
  
"Obviously," Potter muttered, but he still sounded intrigued, not sarcastic. "Well, maybe someone in the Order will know a good way to handle it." He touched Draco's hand, a darting touch that thrilled Draco inexplicably, even more than the night he and Potter had sat there with clasped hands. "Thanks, Malfoy. You're still being helpful. I don't suppose you know any more about what Elwood is doing with the machine?"  
  
Draco shook his head, staring at his hand and wondering when it would stop _tingling._ Not that it had a right to tingle in the first place. "No. Just that he's moved on to suspending red jewels from the chains that make up most of it." Draco had almost said "rubies," but he didn't know for sure that the small red jewels were rubies, and he had learned a lot in the last few days, from Elwood's lectures, about how much different kinds of gems could affect magic. They could change its nature completely, for one thing.  
  
"All right. Again, a member of the Order may know more." Potter hesitated and stood up. "Can you get in the habit of feeding Nagini and making yourself pleasant for her to be around, do you think? It would help a lot if we could just poison her or something. I doubt we'll get the chance to cast Fiendfyre in Malfoy Manor."  
  
"I would be angry if you did," Draco said, with a glare, although he knew if it came down to a choice between the destruction of his ancestors' legacy and the survival of the Dark Lord, he would accept the former and all its consequences. "Yes, I'll try. Last time, feeling the intense desire to get close to her was enough. I fed the Dark Lord a line about you being a Parselmouth and Nagini being in danger because you destroyed the basilisk."  
  
"Well, I did, that's true enough," said Potter, with a shrug that made Draco tingle again for a moment. "Thanks again, Malfoy."  
  
He trotted away. Draco watched him go, and then faced the river and shut his eyes tight, sealing himself into a dream within the dream, determinedly repeating his wish over and over to himself.  
  
 _I need to make myself pleasant to Nagini. I want to do it so she won't eat me. I need to make myself pleasant to Nagini. I want to do it so she won't eat me..._  
  



	8. A Burning

"Although the Dark Lord wants you to babysit his snake, I still require you to assist me."  
  
Nagini hissed as though she understood and was objecting to that description of what Draco did for her. For that matter, Draco did as well. Babysitting called to mind a slightly boring job watching his friends' younger siblings for an hour, not standing vigilantly with wand in hand before Nagini while she hissed to try and frighten him.  
  
But neither of them would gain anything if Draco said that aloud, and so he simply nodded and murmured, "Yes, sir. What do you want me to do?"  
  
Elwood stepped away from the doorway he'd been standing in, and led Draco into the room where he had already helped drain people of their magic and torture them. With an effort, Draco turned his head to the side and managed to ignore the huge machine that stood there and clacked softly to itself through its hanging chains.  
  
Something else glowed in the middle of the floor where the helpless Muggles had lain. It looked like a pool of heated mercury that Draco had once seen illustrated in a Potions textbook. He hesitated and curled his fingers around his wand, trying to decide if he would defend himself if Elwood ordered him to step into it. He knew what kinds of potions that mercury could make, and death would be better than most of them.  
  
"I need the blood of someone who knows Potter well," said Elwood, and his eyes were wild in the way that Draco had already learned they got when he was missing too much sleep. "That means you."  
  
Draco swallowed back sticky nausea and muttered, "I was his rival, sir, not in the same house with him. I don't know him _well_."  
  
"Better than anyone else," said Elwood, and took firm hold of Draco's arm. He didn't have his wand, which you would usually use for a Blood-Drawing Charm, in hand, but rather a large silver knife with a black hilt that Draco had never seen before. On the blade near the edge was a carving of a crescent moon.  
  
Draco closed his eyes and tried to stand still. He knew that he had won rare indulgence from the Dark Lord by managing to free his mother from the Dark Lord's spell. Things would be so much worse now if Draco rebelled in some way or managed to upset Elwood, who was highly favored among the Death Eaters.  
  
" _Back,_ you stupid thing!"  
  
Draco snapped his eyes open, because he didn't think Elwood was addressing him. In fact, Nagini reared up in front of them, her mouth open and her tongue snapping and her fangs bared. Draco would have tried to jerk his arm away from Elwood, consequences be damned, and run and hide if he hadn't realized something.  
  
Nagini was hissing at _Elwood,_ not at him. Draco's efforts at guarding her and the way he had stood still while she twined up his body and the rabbit he had fed her this morning--live, screaming, and terrified--had apparently paid off.  
  
"I am taking his blood for a purpose that our Lord approves of," said Elwood harshly. Draco wondered for a second about all the Death Eaters' propensity to treat Nagini like she understood what they were saying. After all, only the Dark Lord was a Parselmouth and could make himself properly comprehensible to a snake. "Back off and let me do so! Your Lord wishes it!"  
  
Nagini showed no sign of recognizing that the Dark Lord wished it. She advanced, still wreathing and writhing her body in almost impossible directions, and Draco saw fear come into Elwood's eyes at last. He might not have seen Nagini eat people as often as Draco had, but he knew as well as Draco that she was capable of it.  
  
Carefully, as though he had nothing to fear after all, Elwood began to fall back before Nagini, keeping one eye on the snake all the while. Nagini dipped her head and hissed loudly enough to make Draco tremble, although he kept still. He thought Nagini might not harm him as long as she could ignore him.  
  
"I need your blood," Elwood said between gritted teeth. He shifted the knife as if to drop it, but Nagini hissed all the louder, and he stopped the motion. " _That_ much, the Dark Lord has commanded."  
  
"But he didn't command you to cut me with that particular knife?" A little ill, Draco wondered what would have happened had the blade touched his skin. There were so many different enchantments someone could put on a knife like that, it was difficult to be sure.  
  
"It would make your blood more potent," said Elwood, and for a second, his eyes darted away from Nagini to lock onto Draco. "That would be all that happened. I swear it."  
  
Draco shook his head and drew his wand with slow, smooth movements that he hoped would alarm neither Elwood nor Nagini. "I know my own enchantments to make the blood more potent. Nagini?"  
  
The snake stopped moving towards Elwood, although she didn't look at him. She swayed easily back and forth all the time, and Draco could see her tongue darting rapidly out, as though she liked the smell of fear on the air.  
  
"I'm going to add my own blood to the pool the way our Lord would want," Draco said, still clear and slow, and took a step towards the pool of mercury. He wondered if something had changed in Nagini in the last few months. He didn't remember her understanding English so well from people other than the Dark Lord last year, when he had first met her. "Please let Elwood go. Our Lord needs good and faithful servants."  
  
 _Especially since I only serve him out of fear and because I can't escape, and because I think Professor Snape is the same way._  
  
Draco shivered a little at the daring thought, but the Dark Lord wasn't here to read his mind and punish him right now, the same way that Professor Snape wasn't here to do it and scold him. He carefully pushed his wand into his arm and cut a little bit of the skin with a murmured _Diffindo_. The blood ran out in seconds, and Draco squeezed the skin until it was welling up into drops, then cast the charm that would make it more potent.  
  
"How much blood do you need?" he asked Elwood, who was staring at him with a strange, foreign expression on his face.  
  
"Are you a Parselmouth?" Elwood asked.  
  
Draco laughed aloud, and then stopped. He sounded unhinged, and that would mean the end of any respect that Elwood might have for him, if the laughter continued. He simply shook his head and managed to smile at Elwood in a way that felt surprisingly natural.   
  
"No," he murmured. "Our Lord is the only one who has that gift, besides Harry Potter." He turned back to the pool. "How much blood do you need, and how does this work?" He privately thought that Elwood should have asked the Dark Lord for blood, if he needed some sort of magical connection to Potter for his trap to work. The Dark Lord was the one who spent the most time thinking obsessively about Potter, the one who could tell Elwood exactly what his strengths and weaknesses were. Draco could only tell them about Potter's skill in beating him up and snatching the Snitch.  
  
There was a weak stirring in the back of his mind at that thought, as though he could tell them something else, but he remained convinced that couldn't be true. He would have no reason to hold back, not when sharing such information would bring him power and prestige among the Death Eaters, and might possibly keep his mother safe.  
  
"That is enough," said Elwood, when Draco had squeezed seven drops of blood into the pool.  
  
Draco kept his snort to himself as he moved his arm away and cast the simple healing spell on the skin needed to knit it back together, but he did feel the sort of contempt he assumed Elwood often felt for him. First, of _course_ it was seven; seven was a common mystical number. Second, Draco could have easily let one more drop fall before Elwood could stop him. He should have said something earlier.  
  
When Draco glanced at Elwood's dark expression, though, he thought he was wise to keep all displays of emotion to himself. Elwood probably resented the assumption of status he would think Draco had because Draco was taking care of the Dark Lord's snake.   
  
Draco wondered bleakly if he could tell the man that status and power among the Death Eaters were the _last_ things he wanted, and that he would have gladly given everything about it up if he was assured of safety for himself and his mother. He cursed himself every day for not taking Dumbledore's offer when it was made.  
  
Of course, by then it was probably too late. The Death Eaters were inside the school, and Professor Snape had been right up the stairs behind him.  
  
"My thanks," said Elwood, with a formal dip of his head, and turned back to his pool. "You can go now."  
  
Most Death Eaters wouldn't have obeyed that command willingly, but Draco found it easy to. He turned and left with Nagini gliding beside him. When she wanted to wrap her head around his arm, he let her. She was dangerous, but probably less so to _him_ at the moment than some other Death Eaters were.  
  
*  
  
The grey country this time seemed to be brighter to Draco. As he sat dangling his feet in the river, he reviewed again and again, in some amazement, the way he had got close to Nagini. He had done it without even knowing _why_ he was doing it. He had simply felt that pull of his desire, and he had done it.  
  
Maybe he had a future after all, if he could just survive what felt like the Dark Lord's inevitable discovery of this plan.  
  
"Malfoy?"  
  
Draco looked around, and then jumped to his feet, staring. "Potter?" he whispered. He knew his voice came out hushed in quite an inappropriate way, but that was the way he felt as the burned figure staggered towards him.  
  
Potter sighed and sat down, dangling one blistered arm in the water of the river. "That feels so much better than any water I tried to cast on it," he whispered.  
  
Draco supposed that dream-water might be a cure for anything, even burns inflicted by Fiendfyre. But he had something he needed to ask Potter first. "Did you lose control of the spell?" he demanded, stepping up to him. "Or did someone else cast it and you got caught in the way?" He could easily imagine Weasley losing control of the fire the first time he cast it. Or there could be a spy among Potter's Order, a hidden Death Eater, the way that Draco was hidden among the Death Eaters.  
  
"Neither," said Potter, with a sigh. He sank down and submerged most of his body in the water. Draco was left to stand helplessly on the bank. He didn't like the feeling, so he sat down with a scowl and splashed some water over Potter's blackened neck. Potter gasped in response and nodded. "Thanks."  
  
"The explanation," Draco reminded him. "I have got Nagini to trust me and even defend me from another Death Eater, and I'll tell you about what Elwood did today, so I've made progress to share with you. You have to tell _me_ something now."  
  
Potter tilted his head back and blinked at Draco. "You did that?" he whispered. "Wow. You're amazing." Then he began to cough, the sounds tearing their way up his throat from what sounded like smock-blackened lungs.  
  
Draco rolled his eyes and poured more water over Potter's hair. "Praise later, explanations now."  
  
"You _have_ changed," Potter said, but at the sight of Draco's expression, perhaps, he coughed again in a way that meant he was about to start talking instead of succumbing to smoke inhalation. "We did find a few members of the Order who could cast Fiendfyre. And the Horcrux seemed--I mean, we placed it in an open area where there was plenty of water and plenty of space to move around if the fire started pursuing us. See, I did listen when you were talking to me," he added defiantly.  
  
Draco said nothing, but let his hand rest on the back of Potter's neck. He wondered if it was only his imagination that the burns there, covered with a thin layer of moving water, already looked better than they had.  
  
"But the Horcrux's soul came out and fought us this time." Potter was silent, his eyes, from what Draco could tell where he was sitting, on the rippling surface of the stream. "Maybe that's what happened to Moody. I don't know. There was nothing one moment, just the fire burning towards the surface of the Horcrux, and the next instant, there was this shadowy Voldemort in front of me, scratching at my face."  
  
Draco shuddered even though he knew the Taboo on Voldemort's name didn't apply inside the dream, or they would have been found before this. "So it drove you into the flames?"  
  
Potter hesitated.  
  
"Are you this grudging with _all_ your friends?" Draco demanded. He was starting to wonder if this inability to explain what he was doing or where he'd been was the real reason Professor Snape disliked Potter, rather than any incompetence in Potions. Potter had been competent enough in Slughorn's class the past year.  
  
Potter spun around with a wide mouth. "What? Are you--are you calling yourself my friend now?"  
  
Draco's hand stiffened, and his fingers, which he hadn't even realized properly were rubbing Potter's nape, did the same thing. "I can stop."  
  
"No," said Potter. "That's fine. I was just surprised, that's all." He hesitated one more time, then said, "I don't know any spells that can properly take on a Horcrux shade. Any more than I knew spells that could destroy them until you explained about Fiendfyre to me. So I waited until it got wrapped around me like it was going to choke me and jumped into the fire."  
  
 _Of course you did,_ Draco thought, stunned, his fingers this time stopping their stroking motion in sheer outrage at Potter's lack of common sense.  
  
But what else had he expected? Most people didn't survive this kind of burn with Fiendfyre, because the moment the fire touched them it would burn everything, not just blister their skin and blacken it a bit. Trust Potter to survive it because he had done the one thing _no one else_ would dare.  
  
"How did you quench the Fiendfyre?" he asked, and his voice was at least functioning, even if it sounded pretty dry.  
  
"When the spirit got into the Fiendfyre, it turned everything black and cold," said Potter, and shrugged a little. "I actually wasn't awake for that part, so I have to report what I know secondhand. But they told me that the flames turned into dark ice and cracked down the middle, and when the ice melted, there was no trace of the spell left. I suppose the Horcrux and the Fiendfyre were such opposing forces that the one couldn't stand the other."  
  
Draco nodded slowly. That made sense on a sort of poetical or intuitive level (which was probably the level that a Gryffindor would feel it at, of course), even though he had half a dozen magical theories in the back of his head that were screaming that it didn't make sense.  
  
On the other hand, Potter was unlikely to know of those magical theories. Draco didn't think he was weaving an elaborate deception to fool Draco; he had, as he'd said, been unconscious at the time.  
  
"And have you come up with a plan to get into the Manor and kill Nagini?" he asked. He was certain Potter hadn't, but it gave him an excuse to prolong the conversation and sit here stroking Potter's burned neck, and that was something he actually wanted to do, strange as it sounded.  
  
"Not yet," said Potter, and his muscles tensed under Draco's touch as he blew his breath out in a long sigh. "She was always going to be the toughest one, except for actually killing Voldemort himself. But now that I know you've achieved as much as you have, I have some more confidence." He reached back and took Draco's hand and squeezed it hard.  
  
Draco looked down at their joined hands, and said nothing for a long moment. Then he took a deep breath of his own, and started telling Potter about the way that Nagini had defended Draco himself from Elwood, and about the pool of mercury that Elwood had wanted to put Draco's blood into.  
  
But long after Potter had gone back to his own people, Draco sat on the riverbank, feeling Potter's fingers within his, Potter's crisped and singed hair under his touch, and Potter's back leaning trustfully against his chest.


	9. A Fall

"The service that you have rendered has pleased my snake exceptionally, Draco."  
  
Draco crouched and bobbed his head in response to the Dark Lord's praise, wondering how much it was acceptable to preen. Wondering if he _wanted_ to, for that matter. But it was the same double-edged dilemma of every moment before the Dark Lord: show too much eagerness for something, and he would withhold it to spite you, but if you didn't show enough, then he would inflict punishment on you.  
  
"Nagini is a beautiful lady," Draco mumbled, his eyes still on the floor. "I'm pleased that I've been able to entertain her."  
  
The Dark Lord's hand came out and hung in the air before him like a spider on the dangling strand of a web. Swallowing his distaste, Draco let himself rise just the right distance and rest his chin in the Dark Lord's palm, so that his head would tilt back and the Dark Lord could see into his eyes and read his mind without having to abandon his rock throne.  
  
Draco could feel the crush and crash of Legilimency through his mind, and he flinched. It would never become easier, no matter how many times he endured it. And the Dark Lord might look with amusement on something that would bring disfavor tomorrow. Draco didn't know how to walk the edge, didn't know whether he'd displayed enough of one emotion.  
  
The Dark Lord seemed to have decided that, today, that uncertainty was exactly what he wanted, instead of a questioning of his judgment in choosing one particular Death Eater. He loosed Draco's chin with a delighted chuckle and leaned backwards with his hands intertwining. "Do you know why I wanted Elwood to shed your blood with that particular knife, Draco?" he asked.  
  
Draco froze, shivering. If that had been a command of the Dark Lord's instead of Elwood's particular idea, then--  
  
"No, no," said the Dark Lord, and patted Draco's head with the dustiest and driest hand he'd ever felt. "You were not wrong when Nagini rose up and defended you. She is a part of myself, and cannot be wrong." He gave a smile at the snake who slowly curled around his boots, body tangling around itself in what looked like a subtle release of breath.  
  
 _A part of myself._ That wording seemed strange, and Draco wrestled with it for a moment, until he realized the Dark Lord was waiting for an answer to his prior question. Hoping it hadn't been too long, Draco ducked his head and murmured, "No, my Lord. I didn't recognize the enchantments on that knife."  
  
The Dark Lord laughed, a booming sound. "And why should you, when I came up with them myself? Sometimes you remind me of myself when I was young, Draco, and then I remember how very backwards you are in magical strength and genius compared to me." He patted Draco's head again. "Thank you for the glimpses into what I might have been, and what I rose to overcome."  
  
Draco shivered with resentment and the desire to strike out, but of course, the Dark Lord could also have spoken those words as a test, as well as meaning them. Those of his followers who wouldn't submit to his will deserved to be culled, in the way that the Dark Lord saw things.  
  
Draco kept silent, and the Dark Lord nodded and clucked his tongue and said, "You won't have seen any enchantments like that because _I_ was the one who made them. I was the one who created a knife that is a fundamental part of the trap closing around Harry Potter."  
  
Draco blinked. He had known the machine and the pool of mercury were parts of a trap, but he had thought it was a ritual that would cause Potter to fall over dead from a distance or something. The Dark Lord spoke in a more literal way than that, as if it was a snare. "What do you mean, my Lord?"  
  
A second later, he cringed, fearing that he'd spoken out of turn and more than was wanted, but the Dark Lord seemed to be in one of his rare expansive moods this morning where he would explain things, because he wanted other people to admire his magical prowess. He only chuckled and said, "It is a trap that will close around Harry Potter, no matter where he is or where he runs, and bring him to me."  
  
Draco didn't have to feign the gasp he made, and once again the Dark Lord looked pleased. "Yes," he purred. "The machine will resonate in tune with his magic, and permit me to find him. The pool of mercury will poison his will and make him incapable of fighting back. You know that potions containing mercury are often used to make the drinkers docile?"  
  
Once again, Draco nodded. He had had lingering death on his mind more than obedience when thinking about mercury potions yesterday, but it made sense that the Dark Lord would want the docility aspect. He couldn't control Potter via the Imperius Curse, and he would want to torture the boy to death himself, not give him a simple potion.  
  
The Dark Lord sat back, seeming well-content with Draco as audience. "Your blood will make the effect on his will all the greater. Someone who knew him, someone who could always compel him to pay attention...yes, Draco, Severus told me about the way Potter followed you around the school this past year." He chuckled again, a sound like spiders being crushed to death. "You are his current _obsession_. It should prove easy enough for your blood to catch him."  
  
 _So it's like a ritual after all, but a big and confusing one,_ Draco thought. His sight blurred, and his head pounded. He thought that he was feeling angry at the thought of Potter following him around the school and finding him in the bathroom and using _Sectumsempra_ on him, but there was also something else, something more recent and darker and angrier that squirmed at the edges of his vision...  
  
"Are you paying attention, Draco?"  
  
"Yes, my Lord," Draco said, and settled himself back into a more comfortable position on his haunches, one that he could maintain for a long time and that would make him seem more attentive to the Dark Lord. "So you plan to confuse Potter's mind and make him come to you that way?"  
  
Some kind of insolence must have come through his voice that he didn't intend. The Dark Lord hissed casually.  
  
Nagini unwound from about the Dark Lord's feet and slithered over to Draco, her scales rasping so hard against the floor that Draco almost rose and tried to run before he remembered that would only make the situation worse. So he held still while she curled all about him, from his feet up to his neck, and fell over when that was the only thing he could do. He closed his eyes as Nagini's tongue flicked his cheek. He had seen her do that, as if tasting, right before she ate one of her meals.  
  
"I will tell you what I plan," said the Dark Lord, "when I am assured that you cannot speak of it to anyone else. _Mens clausa_."   
  
Draco cried out as his mind seemed to tremble. That was the only way he could describe the sharp, painful rippling in his skull. He would have raised his hands to clap them over his ears, but Nagini was still binding his arms down. He could only tremble, and Nagini's hisses now sounded like laughter instead of promises in his defense.  
  
"What is _this_?"  
  
Draco felt his chin picked up and his head tilted back and forth, but he was in too much pain to open his eyes or do anything else except lie there and pant. Then there was the sharp touch of what seemed to be claws on his eyelids, and the Dark Lord's calm voice said, "Open your eyes now, or lose them."  
  
Draco's eyes sprang open despite the claws pricking at them, and he stared back at the Dark Lord, nearly motionless in his fear. The Dark Lord tore into his mind with effortless Legilimency, a whip of will that made Draco scream.  
  
For once, the Dark Lord seemed to be concerned with something other than whether Draco was displaying weakness at the moment or not. He whirled away from Draco and began to pace back and forth through the room, hissing under his breath. Nagini hissed something in return, but to Draco's regret, she didn't crawl away from him.  
  
Draco touched one hand to his aching head as Nagini's coils loosened a bit. The blurriness that had afflicted his vision was worse now, so he closed his eyes and just lay there. He wondered dimly what had upset the Dark Lord, and what he would do when he found out about Potter and Draco's nightly conversations with him...  
  
 _What?_  
  
There were thoughts about _Potter_ in his head! Draco explored them with growing fear, because he was sure he hadn't put them there, and the list of candidates who could have was quite small. He was sweating hard enough to make Nagini hiss in displeasure by the time he was done.   
  
He glanced up at the Dark Lord.  
  
The Dark Lord was once again seated on the rock throne, bent down so that his head, and thus his eyes, were a short distance away from Draco. He chuckled, and Draco writhed, panic so intense tearing through him that it was like agony.   
  
He had imagined that he would instantly be subjected to a torture curse, or something like it, but instead, Nagini unwound from him and slithered over to coil at the Dark Lord's feet. Draco sat up, shivering. At the moment, he was suspicious of everything that went the way he once would have liked it to go.  
  
"Draco." The Dark Lord spoke the way that Draco thought he would to another snake, besides Nagini, except this time, he was doing it in a language that Draco could understand. "This is an unexpected opportunity."  
  
Draco coughed, trying to moisten his dry throat so he could talk, but it was utterly useless. His hands were shaking frantically, anyway, and no matter how he tried to tighten them, they remained consumed with tremors. He stared down at them and tried, furiously, to will them quiet.  
  
It didn't work.  
  
"I know that you expect to be executed as a traitor," said the Dark Lord almost tenderly. "For your failures, and as an example, the way your father was executed." He laughed. "It is incredible how much hatred you hold towards me for that simple act, even though your father had given his life into my keeping for me to do with as I willed. Yes, decidedly, you remind me of myself. You could build that hatred into a towering edifice given the chance." He looked at Draco with a lipless smile. "You will not have it."  
  
Draco cowered. He wondered what else he could do. The memories of the grey country and the grey river and his chats with Potter were fragmenting and drifting in among his regular memories, and it disoriented him. He knew that the Dark Lord could kill him right now and he wouldn't even be able to lift a hand in defense.  
  
Only one link between the memories remained missing. He didn't know _how_ he'd got into the grey country, or seen Potter. Wasn't Potter supposed to be far away, hiding from everybody and continuing this quest he had?   
  
"I suppose I should have known Dumbledore would find out about my Horcruxes," the Dark Lord breathed, and his mood shifted. Draco fell flat on his face, shaking, in front of the chill cloud of loathing that seemed to fill the room. He knew he would soil himself if this continued much longer, but he had no idea how to make it stop.  
  
"But," said the Dark Lord, and the mood shifted again, and Draco shuddered deep in his bones at the amount of insanity it must have taken to put that much emotion aside, "I have a plan in place to deal with the Horcrux hunter. And his traitor." He reached out and hauled Draco up again, his fingers closing on the nape of Draco's neck. Draco felt the pain flowing through him, the way that the nails cut into him and drew out something that ran in his veins more deeply than blood, and began to cry.  
  
"Yes," said the Dark Lord, "I may not even need the machine Elwood is building, except to hold Potter when he arrives here. I may have the perfect bait." And he gave Draco a smile that made him gibber.  
  
*  
  
In the end, all of Draco's efforts to stay awake and hold back were for naught. The Dark Lord simply cast a Sleeping Charm at him, and Draco opened his eyes to find himself in the grey country once more, walking towards the river with a motion that felt smooth, almost automatic. He knew Potter would be waiting for him there.  
  
He could feel the vast amusement, not his own, riding his mind at the thought of that.  
  
Draco was panting a little by the time he reached the river. And yes, Potter was waiting, and he stood up and came towards Draco with no sign that he knew anything was wrong, his mouth open in what would probably be a welcoming shout.  
  
Draco decided that he could do one thing. Well, attempt to do one thing, anyway. He knew that the Dark Lord would let him speak, so that he could attempt to persuade Potter into the trap. And the Dark Lord's will as there to hurt him if he spoke any words other than the ones the Dark Lord would permit to him.  
  
But there might be a space of a few moments when Draco could speak the right words, the ones that would warn Potter instead.  
  
 _I don't want to do it. I don't want to suffer. I don't want Mother to suffer._  
  
But Draco knew his death was probably only a matter of the Dark Lord's boredom away; he would die for being a traitor when the Dark Lord became bored with torturing him. His mother's life was forfeit. The Dark Lord hadn't said so outright, because of course he had to leave Draco some _hope_ to make it more tormenting, but he had hinted at it.  
  
Potter was almost there. Draco didn't know if the Dark Lord could actually pull Potter to him through the connection between Potter's mind and Draco's, but he wasn't going to take the chance of what would happen when they touched.  
  
He drew a deep breath, arranged his face in a welcoming smile, and blurted out, "He knows. _Run_."  
  
That was as far as he got before the pain crushed down on him and he fell to his knees. He tried to scream, but the scream was frozen in his throat. His hands clawed at his own legs, and he could see long rents opening in his flesh, as though his fingernails had turned into real talons--or his skin had grown impossibly delicate. With the Dark Lord's power, either or both could have been true.   
  
The thoughts flashed through his head and then turned sideways and became sparks of trembling pain. Draco knew he was somewhere, he knew he was in pain, and he knew that someone waited on the other side of the pain, someone he didn't want to fail. It might even be himself. He didn't know. He struggled to the surface, and opened his mouth and screamed again once he reached it.  
  
Suddenly he could scream. Why was the Dark Lord letting him scream?  
  
"Draco!"  
  
It was Potter, crouched beside him. Draco opened his eyes with a moan of despair that, for some reason, he was able to make. Perhaps the Dark Lord thought he deserved _one_ chance to express some of his feelings...  
  
Before he was crushed. Utterly.  
  
And it was despair that filled him when he saw Potter crouching in front of him, shaking his shoulder. He sat back when Draco opened his eyes, but Draco didn't think he was about to get to his feet and bolt, which was the only thing that would have worked. Instead, he knelt there, and his face was filled with a quiet power, a lack of fear that--  
  
That Draco might have admired in other circumstances. Now, he flung his hand out and scratched at Potter's knee in turn, and saw Potter's expression change a little as the pain hit him. But he still didn't run.  
  
"This is the way it needs to happen," said Potter, head turned as if he was talking to someone invisible who stood there. "I didn't know this, but it makes sense now that I'm here and talking to him."  
  
Draco tried to sob, tried to say that nothing made sense, tried again to tell Potter to run, tried to beg Potter to do it for him if he wouldn't do it for his friends or his quest or the wizarding world that he had said he wanted to save. But nothing would come out of his mouth now. He was melting, he thought, turning into water the way that the banks of the grey river had turned completely into water. The Dark Lord had absolute hold of him, and could do what he liked with Draco's mind and body.  
  
Hadn't that always been true? Hadn't he been a fool to rebel against him in the first place, to even try coming to this place and meeting with Potter, however he had done it?   
  
Potter's face changed, and he rested a hand on Draco's shoulder that was the only real thing Draco could feel at the moment. "No. Don't ever think that. When you think like that, it's hopeless. No one can stop him then. No one can save you if you don't keep enough of your defiance alive to rebel."  
  
Draco wished dearly to answer and tell Potter that he was wrong, because defiance was no use, but he didn't get the chance. The world melted around him like wet paint running down a canvas, and then he opened his eyes again in his bed, shivering.  
  
He knew, now. He knew that somehow, the connection between his mind and Potter's, and between the Dark Lord and the Mark on Draco's arm, had been used to bring Potter through into this house. He would be here. In Malfoy Manor. Suffering.  
  
And despite what Potter said, there really wasn't power enough in Draco for defiance.   
  
Draco tucked his arm wearily over his eyes. The only thing that might matter, the only thing worth rising from his bed for, might be vengeance.  
  
But he saw no hope to take that, either. So he lay there and let himself suffer, mind racing in silent, miserable circles.  
  



	10. A Summons

“You’re to come.”  
  
Draco rose breathlessly to his feet. He had waited on his bed for some sign that the Dark Lord was going to torture him, or kill him, or torture his mother, or do something other than leave him here in silence. It would be almost worth it to see Potter writhing at his feet, Draco thought, as long as he  _knew_.  
  
But he hadn’t expected Snape to be the Death Eater to deliver that summons.   
  
Perhaps it was a test for Snape, though. Draco didn’t dare think that the Dark Lord wouldn’t have recognized Snape’s touch in hiding those memories away from the forefront of his mind. So he didn’t dare say anything now. He just nodded and fell into line behind Snape as if he had thought this would happen.  
  
They passed in silence down a few of the corridors Draco had run through when he was a child, fencing with shadows and riding dragons made of thought. Draco wondered if he would ever be able to live here again, or to  _re_ live those memories, without a surge of hatred and fear.  
  
Then he snorted. He was unlikely to find out.  
  
Snape abruptly reached back and gripped his arm. Draco tried to shy away from the pain of his fingers. He would be feeling enough agony soon enough, from a different direction. Draco didn’t intend to spend any time in pain until then.  
  
Snape continued staring forwards and walking forwards. He spoke to Draco only from a corner of his mouth, and his voice was clipped and precise. “Since Potter is here, it changes the game.”  
  
Draco shivered and cowered. Why was Snape  _talking_ to him like this? Didn’t he know how weak Draco was, that he was the reason Potter had been captured in the first place? Didn’t he know that the Dark Lord would wring the memory of this conversation from Draco’s mind the first time he looked into Draco’s eyes?  
  
Snape twisted his arm harshly, and Draco gasped and paid attention. Snape was saying, “When I tell you to do something, I want you to do it, do you understand? I  _will_ have revenge on James Potter.”  
  
Draco blinked again. He had known, in part of him or because someone had once told him, that Snape had hated Potter’s father, but it didn’t seem  _exactly relevant_ to Draco at the moment.  
  
“You should think about something else,” he began, and then doubled over with a sob as Snape pinched something specific in his arm that caused him to stagger with pain. Snape turned around and stared remotely down at him.  
  
“You were a disappointment as a student,” Snape said. “You were not worth making an Unbreakable Vow for. You will  _regret_ it if you do not do exactly as I say, when I say it.  _Do you understand?_ ”  
  
Draco didn’t, no, but he also knew he would get into worse trouble admitting that. So he nodded, and bowed down as if Snape were the Dark Lord himself, and waited until his actions seemed to pass some invisible line of reasonableness. Snape turned away with a sweep of his cloak, and made his way towards the top of the stairs that would lead down to the Dark Lord’s throne room.  
  
“Good. Then come this way.”  
  
Draco tried to keep some distance between them as he did. It seemed to him that Snape had gone mad, or perhaps finally decided that he might as well have some revenge on Potter before the Dark Lord figured out what he had done to help hide Draco’s memories and destroyed him. But Draco didn’t have to like it.  
  
*  
  
“My  _faithful_ servants. Come in.”  
  
Draco started to shiver harder as he took in the throne room. It was entirely empty, except for the Dark Lord. Not even Elwood, who had been the most favored of his Death Eaters lately, was at his side. There was something tall and shrouded over in the corner, but Draco didn’t want to look at it. It seemed like a torture rack to him, or perhaps a gibbet where the Dark Lord would command him to be hanged.  
  
“Yes,” said the Dark Lord with a purr. He stood up, and Draco saw that he wasn’t completely alone after all. Nagini was draped around his shoulders, flowing over most of the throne as well. She lifted her head and gave Draco what he could have sworn was a disappointed glance. “My most faithful servants, because although you planned to rebel against me, you ended up advancing my power more than you could have foreseen.” He laughed in delight.  
  
Professor Snape dropped to his knees as though struck. Draco followed him. He didn’t know if that was the right thing to do—the Dark Lord might not think so, and although both of them could hurt him, the Dark Lord could hurt him far more—but it was all he could think of to do right now.  
  
In any case, the Dark Lord didn’t torture them or set Nagini on them. He paced slowly around them, his laughter echoing and washing over them. Draco thought he managed to suppress his shudders, or else they were hidden underneath his robes, but in truth, the Dark Lord’s laughter was more than he could bear. It was worse than it had been, soft rotting puffs of air from a darkened cavern. Draco wanted to stand up and run out of the room, and he thought he might have, despite the threats to his mother and him, if the Dark Lord hadn’t turned and gestured at the thing that Draco had thought was a gibbet.  
  
The cloth draping it floated up and off. Draco recognized the glitter and flash of jewels, and thought he was seeing Elwood’s machine, but he kept his gaze stubbornly on the floor.  
  
“Oh, look up,” said the Dark Lord in a throbbing voice. Draco didn’t want to think too hard about  _what_ it was throbbing with. “I want you to enjoy the sight of your triumph, and it is less worthwhile if you don’t look upon it.”  
  
Maybe someone brave would have defied the Dark Lord then, and died for it. Maybe death would have been better. But Draco was a coward, and he looked.  
  
The chains were wrapped around something in the center of the machine, instead of dangling from the frame the way Draco had seen them do so far. And that thing was Potter. Only his head looked out from the cocoon of gold metal and red jewels, and so it took Draco a long moment to recognize him. His face was pale, streaked with lines of blood that all seemed to lead back to his scar, and his eyes were closed.  
  
“So delightful,” the Dark Lord whispered, his voice low and thick. “He thought that he could destroy me, but he didn’t  _know_. He didn’t know how powerful I was, and that I would always find out the truth at last, because the people who surround me are too weak to keep me out. Isn’t that right, Draco?” He came back to Draco and reached out his hand. Draco might have stayed staring at Potter, motionless, but Nagini hissed a warning, and he let the Dark Lord manipulate his head so Draco was looking at him. “You are the one responsible for this betrayal.”  
  
Draco wanted to disagree, but his voice was as motionless as the rest of him. And his cowardice probably wouldn’t have let him say something so defiant, anyway. It didn’t matter. The Dark Lord hissed a command to Nagini, and she twined languorously down the Dark Lord’s body and onto Draco’s.  
  
“I think,” said the Dark Lord, “that I shall invite your mother into this room to see what happens to you. But first, you are going to watch me destroy Harry Potter, and for that, you are the audience. Have an honored seat.”  
  
Nagini began to move, constricting her muscles and shuffling Draco along. Helpless in her coils, Draco was steered into the center of the room and held there, motionless, forced to watch as the Dark Lord reached out and gestured with his wand at Potter, murmuring, “ _Rennervate_.”  
  
Potter was awake in seconds, his eyes flaring as though he’d been wrenched from a nightmare. He didn’t see many signs of recognizing that the nightmare was the thing he’d awoken into. He looked at Draco, and his mouth curved in a sad smile.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is rotten for you.”  
  
Draco could feel his eyes stinging. He couldn’t say anything, but perhaps he didn’t need to. Potter looked as though he perfectly understood the feelings surging through Draco, and he smiled again.  
  
“Even though he betrayed you, Harry Potter?” The Dark Lord was circling the machine now, reaching out one hand to stroke the metallic cocoon. “You seem very willing to forgive traitors. I wonder that you would not do the same for Wormtail.”  
  
“Draco didn’t mean to betray me,” said Potter, and his smile was slight, but there. Draco saw some more blood trickle down Potter’s face as huge purple scabs at the corner of his lips cracked. Draco shivered, unable to imagine what tortures might have made Potter’s lips look like that. “He meant to betray you. He didn’t manage to. That’s okay. Wormtail, on the other hand, followed your scaly face of his own free will.”  
  
The Dark Lord’s face twisted, and his wand snapped out. “ _Crucio_!”  
  
Draco actually rocked with the force of the spell, even though he wasn’t the one who’d had it cast at him. He hadn’t thought the Dark Lord was that close to the edge of rage. He had seemed so calm, almost happy, when he was addressing Draco and Snape.  
  
Snape, beside him, tensed almost imperceptibly. Draco probably wouldn’t have noticed it before the last few months, which had made him so sensitive to the moods of other Death Eaters. He eyed Snape sideways. Snape was watching Potter twist in the chains, and finally scream, as though he was watching the achievement of some plan.  
  
Draco remembered the way that Snape had said he wanted revenge on Potter’s dad, and grimaced. Maybe that was all this was. Maybe Snape could forget that  _he_ was probably going to die for his part in Draco’s treachery because he would watch Potter die first.  
  
The Dark Lord lifted the curse after a few minutes, and turned around to sneer at Snape. “I know what you want, Severus. And be assured that it shall not come to you.”  
  
Snape looked at the Dark Lord with a passive expression that puzzled Draco. One way or another, he would have thought Snape was better than that. He should either rage or ask for revenge on Potter or eloquently plead for his life. Or maybe—even though Draco had assumed that of course the Dark Lord would figure out what Snape had done, because there was no way that Draco was good enough at Occlumency to hide his treacherous thoughts on his own—the Dark Lord hadn’t figured enough of it out. Maybe he was thinking about letting Snape live because he was useful, or because he had killed Dumbledore.  
  
“Potter is  _mine_ to destroy,” said the Dark Lord, and his voice dropped to a low rumble. “You are not to intervene.”  
  
Draco turned back to look at Potter, who was slowly ceasing to twitch. He lifted his head a second later, and gave Draco a sympathetic smile. “Both of us wrapped up, huh?” he whispered.  
  
Draco would have nodded, but Nagini hissed when he made the slightest movement. In the end, he just had to lie there and blink his eyes a few times, deliberately, hoping Potter would get the message.  
  
“Yeah,” said Potter, and let his chin dangle, looking at the floor. It was probably easier that way, although part of Draco ached to think of Potter acting so submissive, so spiritless.  
  
“Of course, my Lord,” Snape was saying in a monotone. “I simply wondered whether something that had concerned me in idle moments was true.”  
  
Once again, his tone seemed like nothing special to Draco—still passive, if anything—but the Dark Lord took a long step towards Snape, suddenly focused on him to the exclusion of all else. “Say what you mean,” he whispered. “That is a command, Severus, from Lord Voldemort himself.”  
  
Nagini hissed when Draco automatically flinched at the name, too. From his nest of chains, Potter was watching with bright eyes.   
  
“I wondered,” Severus said, bowing his head, “whether it was true that you were truly immortal, my Lord. Whether you had conquered death.”  
  
“Of course Lord Voldemort is immortal,” the Dark Lord said, and really, Draco thought to himself, he would have to conquer his flinching reflex if he stayed here much longer and listened to this. It was just the way it would be. “Why would you doubt it?” His speech had acquired what Draco thought was a snake-like edge, even though there weren’t a lot of sibilants in those words.  
  
“Because, my Lord,” said Severus, and his voice was still so bland that Draco had to listen hard to convince himself he’d heard the actual words, “you seem to fear the boy.” He tossed his head contemptuously at Potter. “And no one who was immortal would fear that crawling  _incompetent_.”  
  
The Dark Lord rocked slowly back and forth on his feet. “I do not fear him,” he said, and Draco tensed, recognizing that tone. It was cold, black rage that would sweep all before it. What was Professor Snape  _doing_?  
  
Snape only stood there as if he didn’t realize the danger, although Draco had never seen anyone who seemed to know the Dark Lord’s moods as well. Perhaps he’d given up and was ready to die, Draco thought.  
  
Well, some people  _weren’t_. Draco again tried to turn and twist, but Nagini tightened at once, and he had to go still. He could feel her fangs touching his neck.  
  
“Forgive me, my Lord,” said Snape, and performed an elegant bow that swept his head down to touch his feet. But he was immediately rising again, his eyes fastened on the Dark Lord in a way that made the bow seem more like a gesture of scorn than anything else. “But why keep him alive? Why hang him here and torture him and gloat over him if you dare to meet him in combat?”  
  
“I am  _going_ to kill him,” said the Dark Lord. Already, Draco thought he could see his mouth stretching out of shape, the way it had when he was screaming at Draco for failing to kill Dumbledore after he and Professor Snape had escaped from Hogwarts. The Dark Lord’s words warped and stretched and slid out of shape, too. “I will kill him when I have done with him. That is what I just told you.”  
  
“Yes,” said Snape, and still didn’t look away or lower his eyes, even though Draco could have told him it was essential to his survival right now. “But, my Lord, the longer he stays alive, the more you seem to fear him. It makes it seem as though you fear that you  _cannot_ kill him. It makes it seem as though perhaps he will defeat you again. If he could do it as a toddler, why not now?”  
  
The Dark Lord moved, flowing like Nagini across the floor and over to Snape. He pressed Snape back against the wooden side of Elwood’s machine with his long yew wand up against Snape’s jaw. Snape simply looked back with eyes so deep and unimpressed that Draco swallowed. He was aware of the frantic thunder of his own hoarse breathing as though it belonged to someone else.  
  
Nagini drew back, her head cocked as she watched her master. Perhaps she thought the Dark Lord would want her to be the one to execute Snape.  
  
“You dare to question me,” whispered the Dark Lord. “When you did not even search for my spirit during those years when I lay—elsewhere. When you went back to the school and worked for my greatest enemy.”  
  
“I killed him,” said Snape, never flinching, never showing a trace of the conflict that Draco knew perfectly well he had felt after killing Dumbledore. “Your greatest enemy is dead.” He paused, and blinked as though a thought had just occurred to him. “Is that why the Potter boy is still alive, my Lord? Because Albus Dumbledore was truly your greatest enemy, and with him gone, all others are lesser?”  
  
The Dark Lord held still, taut and trembling.  
  
“Forgive me,” said Snape, and bowed his head. “And kill me now, because, my Lord, I must lose faith in you, if you need a lesser servant like myself to kill your greatest enemy.”  
  
The Dark Lord roared wordlessly and spun around. Draco shut his eyes, not wanting to see the moment when Professor Snape died.  
  
“ _Avada Kedavra_!”  
  
But Draco’s eyes popped open anyway, and when the green light flashed, it was heading in the wrong direction. It slammed into Harry Potter’s hanging body, and Potter opened his mouth as if he was going to swallow it down. And then his head dangled, and he was gone.  
  
Draco cried out hoarsely, not even having realized he was going to do that.  
  
But at the same moment, the Dark Lord crumpled to the floor, and Nagini unwound herself from Draco and surged towards him, hissing urgently.   
  
“Draco,” said Snape.  
  
Draco stared at him, unable to do anything else. He was as helpless as though Nagini was still pinning him. Snape stared into his eyes, and there was all that passion and intensity Draco had been missing before.  
  
“Help me kill the snake.”  
  
It was for Potter and not because Snape had told him to obey that Draco stood up, though. Because he had failed at everything else, but he might not fail at this.  
  
 _I’m so sorry, Potter,_ he thought incoherently as he stumbled forwards at Professor Snape’s side.  _Please forgive me, if you’re someplace where you can._


	11. A Surprise

Nagini was wound about the Dark Lord, in almost the same way that the Dark Lord had told her to bind about Draco, but her coils were running up and down his body, massaging back and forth as if he would wake up from that. Draco hoped not. The center of his chest still felt frozen, but the sight of that pale hand seizing the yew wand would probably freeze his whole body.  
  
“Now,” said Snape, and his voice was quiet, so controlled that Draco thought it would splinter into shards any second. “I want you to cast the exact same spell that I will, at the snake. Do you understand?”  
  
Draco nodded, and said nothing about how easy that was to understand and how hard to do. He had no idea what spells Snape would choose to cast on Nagini. Maybe they would be ones Draco didn’t have the power to match.  
  
But Snape didn’t hesitate, and didn’t ask Draco’s opinion, either. He only pointed his wand, and a second later, the incantation ripped free from him. “ _Sectumsempra!_ ”  
  
Draco gaped, and wanted to protest. That was the spell that Potter had used to tear him apart in the bathroom at Hogwarts, he  _knew_ it was.  
  
But Potter was dead, and he had more than paid for that crime, the way Draco understood it. He let fly with the identical curse, and watched as both spells cut into Nagini, Snape’s near her head and Draco’s near her tail.  
  
Nagini didn’t die, though. Maybe Draco’s spell had been misaimed, or maybe magic that affected humans didn’t affect magical snakes. She whipped around with a hiss and began to pour towards them, and Draco found himself holding his breath, wondering what in the world he could do next.  
  
Snape seemed to have no doubt. He reached into his pocket and pulled out something that shimmered and tilted back and forth in its crystal flask, something that looked like thick wine of the kind Draco’s father had favored with dinner. Severus uncorked the flask and cast the potion inside out in front of him.  
  
Draco gagged when he smelled the potion. Nothing he had ever brewed stank that badly. Nagini abruptly reared up and acted as if she was trying to go backwards when her tongue flickered out of her mouth, but she had come too far forwards. The potion hit her, and specifically the cuts on her head and tail that the spells had caused.  
  
Nagini began to cry out in what sounded oddly like a human’s hiss of agony, her head snapping back and forth. Draco watched in silent horror as the slice in her neck widened. The potion Snape had cast seemed to be eating into it, deepening the cut like a river carving a canyon, and soon her head was only hanging onto her body by a strip of skin and scale. And then the potion gave a sharp bubbling noise, and Nagini collapsed to the floor, motionless, parts of her body rapidly dissolving.  
  
“What  _was_ that?” Draco asked, the words almost exploding out of him. He could understand the spells not working against Nagini if the Dark Lord had cast some spell that protected his snake—which of course he would have if she was a Horcrux—but he didn’t know why the potion Snape had used next had worked.  
  
“Basilisk venom,” was the only thing Snape said, and he ignored all of Draco’s questions about where he had got it and why it had worked. He moved swiftly over to Potter’s body and spent a moment staring into his dangling face. Draco turned his head aside, shuddering. If Snape wanted to savor this moment as his revenge on Potter’s dad, fine, but there were some things too awful for Draco to watch.  
  
“I can only hope that this is what Albus meant,” he heard Snape mutter, and he turned back when something silvery and soft abruptly appeared, to fill the room with light. He thought Snape had cast a spell, but no, instead Snape held his arms out towards Potter. It looked as though his hands had been cut off at the wrists.  
  
Draco yelped, and then realized that Snape held Potter’s Invisibility Cloak. Where had he got  _that?_  
  
Snape gave him a faint, contemptuous glance, and draped Potter’s body in the Cloak. Draco sighed a little as it disappeared. Yes, maybe he was a coward, but it was easier to look at Potter when he didn’t have to look directly  _at_ him.  
  
“Now we must deal with a final threat,” said Snape, and turned around.  
  
Draco opened his mouth to ask what that was, and then leaped and whirled as he heard the most awful sound he had ever heard. The Dark Lord was stirring, and his hand was already creeping like a twitching spider towards his wand.  
  
He stopped, though, and Draco knew the  _exact_ moment when his eyes fell on the chopped-up, dead Nagini, because he uttered a loud hiss that filled Draco’s stomach with water. He started to back away, towards Snape.  
  
Snape took a single step forwards. His eyes were as intent on the Dark Lord as they had been when he was goading him to kill Potter. And his hand was in his pocket again. Draco had almost lost his capacity to be surprised, and only wondered what Snape thought he would pull out  _this_ time.  
  
He blurted, “ _What_?” in shock when Snape took out a round glass vial. Draco had never seen one like it. Most vials were long and thin so you could store them in a shelf easily, or at least so you could put them in a pocket or sling them on a belt. This one looked like a ball, except that of course it was ridiculous to have a glass ball.  
  
The Dark Lord was rising slowly to his feet like the wrath of a god. Snape wound up and threw the glass ball as hard as he could. The Dark Lord didn’t even try to dodge as the ball splattered against his chest and the shards jabbed him in the chest, covering him with the potion. He was gliding towards them, and Draco didn’t think he had eyes for anything else.  
  
But when the Dark Lord took a step, his legs seemed to falter beneath him. He dropped to his knees on the floor, snarling. Draco wanted to faint, but he found himself compelled to stand there, staring. He didn’t know what was going on, but it didn’t seem to matter, not if the long strides that Professor Snape was taking towards the Dark Lord were serious. He was the one who was going to take care of this situation, not Draco.  
  
The Dark Lord lifted his head and hissed something in Parseltongue. Draco was glad that he would never know what the monster was saying. And then the Dark Lord sprawled forwards and lay there, twitching uselessly. Draco watched the twitches race up and down his legs in the seconds before his face settled into repose. He stared. It seemed to be real sleep.  
  
“What?” He whispered it this time.  
  
“The vial contained the Draught of Living Death.” Snape shrugged. “A slight variation made it able to be effective upon entering the bloodstream, rather than on being drunk.” Draco wanted to laugh; Snape sounded so absurdly like Professor Snape, lecturing to Draco back in the Hogwarts potions lab, as though nothing had happened since then.  
  
“Why not just kill him?” Draco whispered. He looked at the Dark Lord, and then away again. Even knowing they might be able to handle him like this, Draco’s heart was still throbbing furiously up his throat. He would never be easy until the Dark Lord was dead.  
  
“I had not thought you so bloodthirsty,” Snape said, but he continued, instead of trying to enjoy the effects of Draco’s flush. “Because he would be a nightmare to duel. This was the surer method to bring him down. And we need to wait until—to see if Albus was right.” He turned and faced Potter’s shrouded corpse.  
  
Draco turned with him, as much as he didn’t want to. He thought this was something he really  _owed_ Potter. He had been the one who helped the Dark Lord capture him.  
  
But he leaped back and yelled as loudly as he could when he saw Potter’s corpse, covered by the Cloak, stirring.  
  
Snape reached out and grabbed his arm, cutting off his scream with a Silencing Charm. Then he cast a locking spell at the door and strode over to Potter. With another flick of his wand, he cut the golden chains that were wrapped around Potter and lifted him down.  
  
He was  _moving._  
  
He was alive.  
  
 _That can’t be true,_ Draco thought numbly.  _No one survives the Killing Curse._  
  
And then, like another echo from a distant, gentler time, the thought,  _He did. Once before._  
  
Draco shook his head and said nothing. He watched as the Cloak thrashed, only visible  _because_ it was moving and sent ripples of light and shadow racing around the room. Then Potter pushed himself slowly out of the middle of it, and blinked, and shook his head, and looked around the room as though he was trying to decide what should happen next.  
  
His gaze fell on Draco, and softened. “You didn’t tell him, did you?” he asked Snape, simply, wearily.  
  
“I dared not,” said Snape. “I didn’t even know if it would work.” He was already standing back from Potter with a scowl on his face and his arms folded, as if he didn’t appreciate the fact that Potter was alive.  
  
The only thing Draco could say, to Snape, was, “You told me that you wanted revenge on his father, through him.”  
  
Snape gave him a remote look. “That was there in case the Dark Lord read your thoughts, to make it seem as if I hated Potter and give me some breathing room to enact the plan. I could not have you betraying me the way you did him.” He nodded at Potter as if seeing someone come back from the dead was nothing remarkable.  
  
Draco flinched, and Potter said at once, “He did it  _accidentally_. And anyway, it’s because your Legilimency walls weren’t strong enough.” He gave Snape a long, meaningful glance. “You concentrated more on protecting yourself than on protecting him.”  
  
Snape snorted and looked away. Potter stood up and came over to Draco, gently taking his hands and turning them back and forth as if he expected to find the Dark Mark on Draco’s palms instead of his forearm.  
  
Draco let out a dry sob that surprised even him, and wrapped his arms around Potter, holding him close because he had to feel the warmth and the breath on his neck. “How did you—I have to know.”  
  
“Of course you do,” said Potter. “I would have told you if there was any way I could.” His almost painful sincerity made Draco hold him closer than ever. “The shortest part of the story is that Dumbledore figured out I was also a Horcrux. And he told Snape. And Snape managed to communicate that information to me before he handed the box over to you.”  
  
Draco felt as though someone had passed him through a curtain of water, or heat. “That’s what I still couldn’t remember,” he whispered. “How I’d been communicating with you. But it was that box.”  
  
Potter nodded, his eyes tender. “So I knew I had to get myself killed somehow.” Draco clutched at him again, but Potter gave no sign that he’d noticed how disturbing his own words were. “But at the same time, there was something else Dumbledore hoped for. He thought that the bit of Voldemort’s—”  
  
Draco flinched on instinct, and then remembered they were in the middle of the Dark Lord’s current headquarters. No alarms would ring here, because all the Death Eaters would assume that Voldemort was simply speaking his own name, the way he tended to do sometimes.  
  
“Soul that was attached to mine,” said Potter, with a gentle smile that said he knew and forgave Draco’s flinch entirely, “might die if Voldemort could be the one that used the Killing Curse on me. Then  _I_ might be the one to survive.”  
  
“But why did Professor Snape put the Invisibility Cloak over you?” Draco asked warily, staring at the Cloak on the floor.   
  
Potter turned and stirred his fingers through it. “It’s special,” he said quietly. “Again, Dumbledore wasn’t sure, but he was  _almost_ sure that it was Death’s Cloak. One of the Deathly Hallows. It’s strongly linked to my family line, and I’ve used it for a long time. Combined with the fact that the Killing Curse could hit Voldemort’s soul instead of mine, it  _might_ have been able to hold my soul in my body.” He turned around and smiled, and this time, Draco thought he seemed dazed. “It did.”  
  
“As did the prior exposure to the Resurrection Stone left to you by Dumbledore,” Snape abruptly interrupted, his voice cold. “You  _know_ that the combined force of two Hallows you owned was enough to hold you here, to give you the choice to come back.”  
  
“No.” Potter’s face and voice were clear again, and although he didn’t look at Snape with the loathing Draco had been used to seeing in school, it wasn’t anything like the way he had looked at Draco in the past few days. “I didn’t have a choice. I was  _dead._  I think the Killing Curse killed the soul bit, and the Hallows held my soul so it didn’t fly away, but I—I didn’t have a choice. I was  _dead_.”  
  
 _No wonder he’s dazed,_ Draco thought, a bit awed, and unconsciously tightened his hold on Potter. Potter reached out and glanced a hand down Draco’s cheek, muttering something under his breath.  
  
“You own the Resurrection Stone?” Draco had to ask.  
  
Potter nodded. “Dumbledore found it last year, as part of a different Horcrux. He passed it on to me, but Snape was the one who told me what it was later, the way he told me he was a Horcrux.” This time, his expression was carefully cordial. “Now. You still have to kill him, I presume? And you don’t think I’ll fall dead again the minute you slit his throat or whatever it is you’re going to do?”  
  
“I thought I would leave that up to you.” Snape’s eyes turned slowly from Potter to the Dark Lord’s motionless body. “Since you appear to be the one who has to do it, according to the prophecy.”  
  
“Prophecies, too,” Draco said to no one in particular. He knew, because Potter had just told him, that Potter and Snape had been plotting behind everyone’s backs for a long time, but it seemed there was  _so much_ there that Draco wondered how any explanation could take care of it.  
  
“I know,” said Potter. “I’ll explain it.” He touched Draco again on the cheek, and gave him a glance that Draco knew was meant to communicate something, but unlike the way he had felt when Potter was hanging in the chain cocoon, he didn’t know what it was meant to be. “But right now, I have something to do.” He paused in the middle of standing up and glanced at Snape, lifting one eyebrow. “If someone can reassure me that killing him won’t kill me.”  
  
“How can it?” Snape asked impatiently. “The last link between you was severed when the Horcrux in you died at his hand. He fell over from the shock of that, which gave us the chance to kill Nagini.” He nodded at the slaughtered snake, which Draco thought so far Potter had done a champion job of ignoring. Then again, perhaps a dead snake, even one with basilisk venom still bubbling in its wounds, was small compared to the feeling of dying and coming back again.  
  
“Very well, then,” said Potter, and caught the wand Snape tossed him. “The others took care of the last one before I—arrived. No more Horcruxes.”  
  
He walked up to the Dark Lord and stood there for a moment looking down at him. Draco thought nothing could interrupt that silent stare, but suddenly he glanced back at Draco, then at Nagini, and said, “ _We_? Good for you.”  
  
Draco lifted his head. If he had felt sunlight shining on his face at that moment, he couldn’t have been any more relieved or happier.  
  
Potter looked down at the Dark Lord again, and his face relaxed so much that it was hard for Draco to believe he was gazing at his mortal enemy. But then Potter shook his head and murmured, “Good-bye, Tom. This is probably for the best, rather than me having to kill you in a duel or something.”  
  
He reached out and laid his wand against the Dark Lord’s throat, and said something too quiet for Draco to hear. A second later, a long slit opened up against the Dark Lord’s throat, and dark blood spilled on the floor.  
  
It wasn’t a violent death, although Draco found himself watching for the exact moment that the Dark Lord’s chest stopped moving. And then it arrived, and Potter took a step back and swallowed and shook, and then turned and grabbed onto Draco as if he was the one who needed comfort. Maybe he did, at that, Draco thought in wonder, and wrapped his arms around Potter and buried his head against his.  
  
Then, it was truly over.


	12. A Handclasp

“I still don’t like to think how much of this you planned without informing me,” Draco said.  
  
His voice was slow and warm and drowsy, because, at the moment, that was the way his body felt. He was draped over Harry’s lap, and Harry was breathing as softly as the fire did, the motions of his chest matching the flickers of the flames. Draco couldn’t open his eyes or raise his voice to the level he thought it should be, a stern and commanding shout, demanding that Harry open his eyes and look at him, and account for his actions.  
  
Draco had been a pawn, of sorts, in this contest between the Dark Lord and Harry. Or between the Dark Lord and Snape and Harry. But it seemed that neither Harry nor Professor Snape was properly remorseful for that.  
  
“I know,” said Harry softly, and his fingers intertwined through Draco’s hair. Draco was horribly afraid that he made a purring noise as he nestled his face into Harry’s leg. It was out there now, though, and there was no way of taking it back. “I wish we could have told you more. But I never did mean for you to be Voldemort’s instrument, you know.” Draco was so relaxed that he didn’t even flinch at the name. “I thought I would arrange to be captured and brought to him as soon as I’d finished destroying the rest of the Horcruxes. I was only lucky that I’d already told the others in the Order so much about them that they could figure out how to destroy the last one themselves.”  
  
Draco sighed. “The last one other than you.”  
  
“Yes.” Harry’s fingers tightened for a moment, and then smoothed out and went on stroking in apology when Draco made a wordless noise of protest. “Snape told me about that a long time ago, right after a conversation he had with Dumbledore about it.”  
  
Draco rolled over so he could look up into Harry’s face. Harry looked back down at him with softened eyes that Draco knew well how to read. But he pretended he didn’t, fluttering his eyelashes instead and murmuring, “And you really thought you would survive the Dark Lord hitting you with a Killing Curse?”  
  
“I didn’t know for sure,” Harry said soberly. “That was something Professor Dumbledore theorized, and he convinced Snape of it. But I never knew for sure. I—Professor Dumbledore knew that my Cloak was a Deathly Hallow, probably pretty early on. And after he found and destroyed one of the Horcruxes, he knew where the Resurrection Stone was. Because I owned one of them and I could inherit the other one, he thought they could hold my soul here.”  
  
“He knew where the third Hallow was, though,” Draco said, and took Harry’s wrist and moved it so that his hand was stroking Draco’s scalp in exactly the right place. Draco arched, certain he looked like a decadent cat, equally certain he didn’t care.   
  
“Yes,” said Harry. “His wand.”  
  
His voice was deep and sad, and his hand had stopped moving altogether. Draco turned to the side so that Harry’s fingers would brush through at least some of his hair, and squinted at Harry. “You know what Professor Snape said about the reasons Dumbledore didn’t leave you the wand. I agree they’re probably the truth.”  
  
“I know,” Harry whispered, but didn’t say anything else.  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. Only Harry would simultaneously agree that it would have been a burden to be Master of the Deathly Hallows, the way he could have been if Dumbledore had left him the wand, and yet resent it anyway.  
  
Of course, Draco thought Harry resented it more than anything because Dumbledore hadn’t  _told_ him what he planned to do, not because Dumbledore had decided taking away the power of the Elder Wand was more important than Harry’s ultimate survival. Harry could take being neglected and even tortured. It was harder for him to be lied to, even by omission.  
  
Draco, who had been lied to a  _lot_ more, including by the boy whose lap he rested in, thought the resentment was silly and would go away in time. So he said, “You promised you would tell me what that spell was that you used on Greyback.”  
  
“Just something Hermione came up with,” said Harry, and he looked unaccountably embarrassed, unless it was because Granger had been the one to come up with the spell instead of him.   
  
“You  _said_ ,” Draco muttered, and Harry nodded and cleared his throat a little and began to talk.  
  
*  
  
There wasn’t nearly enough time between the moment when he and Harry stood embracing and the moment when the Death Eaters began to pound on the locked door, in Draco’s opinion.  
  
“This is what we must do,” said Snape. If he had ever been out of control, he was back in it, his voice and face both calm and smooth and cool. “There are some Death Eaters who will flee at the sight of the Dark Lord’s dead body. We must float it in front of us and make sure they see it.”  
  
“And the ones who won’t?” Draco asked. He was thinking of them. Elwood. Rodolphus. Fenrir Greyback. At least Bellatrix was no longer a problem.  
  
“We shall take care of them.”  
  
Draco eyed Snape sideways and shivered a little. He wondered why he had never noticed this deadly, coiled side of Snape beneath his mask, not the Death Eater but the man simply and utterly committed to violence.  
  
“Good,” said Harry, and he stepped back and lifted his wand. The body of the Dark Lord rose from the floor, its head rolling grotesquely to the side, the wound in the neck opening to spill some of the blood down the pale skin.  
  
Draco averted his gaze, swallowing queasily. He knew that Harry had had to kill him, but he still—it still made him a bit sick to watch.  
  
“Now,” said Harry, and although Draco didn’t think he was asking it as a question, Snape nodded and threw open the door of the torture room.  
  
“Now.”  
  
Draco didn’t remember much of the way that they had pounded through the corridors. He could hear snarls off to the side that indicated the presence of Greyback, and that made him bow his head and run faster than ever. He heard a clatter that suggested flung stones were falling over their heads, but then cold touched his arm and he shuddered. It was probably spells, and not stones.  
  
He  _did_  see the way that Harry apparently conjured a sack to swallow Greyback up, though. He seemed to have dropped through the sack to the center of the earth. Draco vowed to ask Harry about that later.  
  
If they survived.  
  
Once, Elwood appeared in front of him. Acting solely on terrified instinct, Draco screamed and struck. He couldn’t remember what spell he had used, but there was one; he didn’t try to simply slap Elwood across the face with his wand. Elwood fell down on the floor in front of them, and Harry helped Draco leap over his body and find the next set of stairs that led down.  
  
Draco did stop at one point, with a cry working its way up his throat. He had thought simply of escaping, and what about his mother? She was up in her room and had no idea about what had happened.  
  
“Taken care of,” Snape told him curtly, and Draco saw that his mother was there with her hand on Snape’s arm. Once again, Draco had no idea of when that had happened.  
  
They began to run again, and Draco suspected that Snape was using some magic to help his mother maintain the pace, but there was nothing he wanted more at the moment, so he didn’t dispute it. He kept his gaze focused straight ahead and vaulted over the barriers that appeared in his path. He never saw Rodolphus.  
  
They made it out through the Manor’s front door. Snape turned and cast some spell the instant they did.  
  
Draco heard rumbling. The walls might be falling in. The roof might be collapsing. He didn’t care. He had come out of the house with the people he valued most, and he didn’t think he would ever really want to go back to Malfoy Manor.  
  
He tightened his hold on Harry’s hand and reached out to take his mother’s. She gave him a faint smile.  
  
“I understand that we have Snape to thank for this,” she said, in a ghost of a voice. “And Mr. Potter.” A moment’s pause, and then her hand tightened on his wrist enough to make Draco wince a little. “And you.”  
  
“He was the bravest of us all,” said Harry softly. “And he played his part without knowing what was expected of him, or choosing it, but he still did it.”  
  
“I chose it a little,” Draco muttered. He looked at Snape out of the corner of his eye for a moment. He knew now that Snape must have had the box for a long time before he gave it to Draco. He wondered why that had happened just then.  
  
“Yes,” said Snape, sweeping them all up with his eyes as much as with the motion of his arm, “but this is not the time to discuss it. Mr. Potter,  _if_ you would.” Even when he was asking a favor, Draco thought, he sounded like he wanted revenge on Harry for his father’s sins.  
  
Either Harry knew Snape’s manner was fake, or he had just got used to it over the months they worked together. He nodded and reached for his wand, and the next minute, a blazing silver stag had leaped into view. Draco flinched. He had once seen that stag way too close, as it charged at him down the Quidditch pitch.  
  
Harry smiled at him and murmured to the stag, “We’re safe. Snape and me and Draco and his mum, at the First Place. Go tell Ron.” The stag stomped a hoof and sprang away, and Harry took Draco’s hand and held it securely. “Shall we?”  
  
“Apparate?” Draco whispered. It seemed impossible that he had got outside the Manor’s walls with all his limbs and his will intact, although he didn’t know how else to explain the fact that he was standing here and breathing the same air as Harry.  
  
“Yes,” said Harry. “To one of the places the Order of the Phoenix was using as a safehouse. That doesn’t mean Ron and Hermione will be there to meet us, though. That’s why I sent the Patronus. They could be anywhere, but they’ll come and join us once the Patronus tells them so.”  
  
Draco grunted. He thought the explanation a bit condescending—that part he could have worked out for himself—but at least Harry was explaining things to him now. He took Harry’s arm, and prepared himself for the Side-Along Apparition.  
  
The First Place was a dusty house that had definitely seen better days. Draco saw a coat of arms on the wall beneath a round window, and squinted, trying to make out what it was and whose house this would have been. A second later, he stopped and blinked at himself, shaking his head.  
  
 _I can think about normal things like that again?_  
  
It was the first sign, perhaps the best one, that the Dark Lord had not irrevocably damaged his brain. Draco found himself relaxing, even smiling. Yes, he could get used to living like a normal person again.  
  
“I am taking your mother up to a room where I can treat her,” said Snape abruptly, snappishly, steering past them so that he could guide Narcissa up the steps. She didn’t stumble as badly as she might, Draco saw. She hadn’t been cursed in the last day or two, then. That meant she would be all right. She really would. “It is more than obvious that no members of the Order of the Phoenix are here, and thus no one can help me.”  
  
Draco opened his mouth to say that  _he_ would, but Harry put a hand on his shoulder and murmured, “Can I talk to you?”  
  
All sorts of things that Harry might say crowded Draco’s head in a dizzy whirl. However, precisely because there were so many, he couldn’t come up with any particular decision on which might be first. So he nodded, with his throat dry, and only lingered to make sure that Narcissa did reach the top of the stairs safely before he turned to face Harry.  
  
Harry looked at him for a second, a long, searching look that Draco thought saw deeper than even some of the glances they’d exchanged while Harry hung on Elwood’s torture machine. Then he reached out and placed one hand delicately, palm open, on Draco’s shoulder again.  
  
Draco waited. Maybe it was going to be,  _Thanks for all the help, but I don’t need you now that I’m back from the dead and about to enjoy my fame and fortune and friends._  
  
“Thank you,” Harry whispered. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”  
  
Draco shook his head a little, in a dream. “Why did you choose me? You can’t have thought I’d be friendlier to your cause than Snape was.”  
  
“Snape thought someone would discover that he had the box in his possession,” Harry murmured back, “and he didn’t want that. And, well, he chose you especially because you’d lost your father, and had that motivation to help us.”  
  
“I see,” said Draco, and closed his eyes. He felt a little numb. “Then it was because I was a convenient tool.”  
  
“At first, yes.” Harry held him, still, close, and Draco found himself opening his eyes and gazing back at Harry. Harry smiled reassuringly. “You were the one that Snape suggested, and when he told me about why he thought you’d want to do it, I agreed. But then you came in and talked to me, and told me things about Elwood’s machine that no one else could have, and you—you showed that there was more out there than being a Horcrux and dying at a certain specific time. Because you didn’t  _know_ , and you couldn’t remind me of it constantly.”  
  
“Did the rest of your Order of the Phoenix know?” Draco asked quietly.  
  
“Only Ron and Hermione.” Harry smiled faintly. “And that was because they insisted and insisted and insisted until I told them. Hermione was always looking around to try and figure out how I could survive it, but I didn’t have much hope of her finding anything. But the rest of the Order didn’t know, and I didn’t even want to tell Ron and Hermione, because I was afraid they might try to stop me.”  
  
“Well, I  _certainly_ would have,” Draco retorted. “And that’s not even because we’re—friends, or whatever we are.” He gestured between them, wondering what he was indicating, feeling as though he should be pushing his hand through thick air or something. “Because I thought you were our only hope of defeating the Dark Lord.”  
  
Harry nodded, not even looking upset. “I know. There are some members of the Order of the Phoenix who would have felt the same way. They didn’t all know me very well.” He hesitated. “Can you—we both used each other. Can we both get past that and forgive each other?”  
  
Draco didn’t know for certain, but he thought Harry was asking himself as much as Draco. Draco could only answer for his side of the equation, though.  
  
“If you  _ever_ again walk away without giving me an answer to a question, or you lie to me,” he said carefully, “then you won’t have my forgiveness.”  
  
Harry’s smile was slow and dazzling. He leaned in, and Draco embraced him again.  
  
He heard noises outside. Presumably Harry’s Order of the Phoenix was arriving. He had only a minute to do what he wanted to do, and he would have to be quick and light, in case Harry had to gently push him away.  
  
Draco kissed Harry clumsily, and knew he could blame the clumsiness on all sorts of things: fear, weariness, the sheer adrenaline-punching terror of the chase through Malfoy Manor. But it was there, and it was done, and he moved cautiously away from Harry, and then lingered for a second to see what the effect would be.  
  
Harry opened his eyes slowly. His cheeks were flushed for a second with something that looked as deep and dazzling as his smile. Then he reached out and slid a hand up and down Draco’s cheek, as though checking for its plumpness.  
  
“Thank you,” he said. “That tells me what I need to do next.”  
  
Draco would have asked what that was, but then various people started arriving, and he didn’t have the chance to ask, as much as he would have liked to.  
  
*  
  
And in the end, of course, despite protests from Harry’s friends and some of the rest of the Order of the Phoenix, and sharp looks from Snape—who had fought at Harry’s side and done his best to bring him back from death, but who, Draco thought, still didn’t seem to  _like_ Harry very much most of the time—and even his mother’s languidly lifted hand, they had become what they had become.  
  
There were stolen kisses. There were clasped hands and slyly exchanged glances when the rest of the room wasn’t looking. There were confessions and laughter and rows that seemed to go on for hours, and at last, there was the warmth of a shared bed, and Draco’s slow stirring back to wakefulness with sprays of kisses all over his arms and shoulders and Harry’s brilliant smile awakening beside him.  
  
There was, finally, this, Draco lying on Harry’s lap in front of the fire with nothing uncommon about it at all.  
  
Draco did have one thing to say, though, one thing that he thought he had to ask before Harry got any ideas.  
  
“Do you wish it was different?” he asked. “That you hadn’t been tricked and pulled in by the Dark Lord like that, and you hadn’t been tortured, and you hadn’t had to die and come back?”  
  
He could feel Harry’s headshake above him, traveling in soft ripples through his legs and so into Draco’s pillow. “I would have had to die and come back regardless. Or die and  _not_ come back. That was the only way for the Horcrux to be destroyed.”  
  
Draco gave a little light growl and sat up so he could scowl at Harry. “You know what I mean. Do you ever wish that it had been different, that things had worked out?”  
  
“I wish your father was alive,” Harry said quietly. “That Moody was alive, and hadn’t got killed because I was too impatient about destroying that diadem and didn’t tell him everything.” He closed his eyes. “I wish that I hadn’t been tortured, you hadn’t been tortured, your mother hadn’t been tortured. I wish my friends hadn’t had to suffer as much as they did from not knowing what had happened to me.”  
  
Draco pulled a lock of his hair demandingly. “But?” There was a “but” in there somewhere.  
  
“I can’t unwish Voldemort being destroyed,” said Harry simply. Draco didn’t even flinch at the name this time. “And I can’t unwish meeting you, being with you.” He bowed his head.  
  
Draco met his lips eagerly, wrapping a hand furiously around his thin wrist, and when Harry shifted and murmured, “I think we should move this to the bedroom, before my lap becomes uncomfortable for you,” Draco scrambled to his feet with his heart beating and his cheeks flushed with a fierce triumph.  
  
 _Yes. And yes again. This is the way it was meant to be._  
  
 _This is the way it’s going to be. And we won’t let each other go._  
  
 _Because we don’t want to, and the wanting is enough._  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
